Converting an existing Ruby on Rails application to MongoDB

Recently, while working on agilely, I realized that MongoDB was a better fit for my database design. I am currently converting the entire application from PostgresQL to MongoDB, and thought I'd share what I learned along the way.

Note that this post does not cover migrating your data from a RDBMS. If you have a production app with data that needs to migrated, you might want to look at the pg2mongo migration framework, or view the official MongoDB migration guide

MongoDB Installation

First, we have to install MongoDB. If you're on a mac, you can do this with Homebrew:

$ brew tap mongodb/brew
$ brew install mongodb-community@4.2

To view the installation process for all operating systems, refer to the MongoDB docs

Rails Configuration

Now that you have MongoDB installed, you have to configure your rails application to use it as your default database.

The officially supported MongoDB ODM for rails is Mongoid. Mongoid aims to achieve parity with ActiveRecord, and the Mongoid team has done an excellent job at making the switch as seamless and easy as possible. Mongoid accepts all the ActiveRecord associations, validations, and callbacks you are used to. Getting rails to switch to Mongoid can be tricky, but if you follow all the steps, you should be able to get it to work.

If you go to your config/application.rb file, you will most likely see the following:

...
require "rails/all"
...

This line is telling rails to include all the default frameworks. If you want to use Mongoid however, you need to remove this line and instead explicitly choose all the frameworks you want for your app:

...
require "rails"
# Pick the frameworks you want:
require "active_model/railtie"
require "active_job/railtie"
# require "active_record/railtie"
# require "active_storage/engine"
require "action_controller/railtie"
require "action_mailer/railtie"
require "action_mailbox/engine"
require "action_text/engine"
require "action_view/railtie"
require "action_cable/engine"
# uncomment if your app uses the asset pipeline
# require "sprockets/railtie"
# uncomment if your app uses rails test_unit
# require "rails/test_unit/railtie"
...

Note that active_record and active_storage are not being required. Mongoid will take the place of active_record, and because activestorage depends on active\record, it cannot be used with Mongoid.

Now that we are not using active_record, any references to it in files in the config directory need to be removed. For example:

config.active_record.dump_schema_after_migration = false
config.active_storage.service = :local

We also need to remove the active_storage npm package. To remove this, run:

$ yarn remove @rails/activestorage

And remove this line from your application.js webpack entry point file:

require("@rails/activestorage").start();

You can also delete the /storage directory and your config/storage.yml file

You might be wondering why we haven't deleted the /db directory and the config/database.yml file. Deleting these files now can cause errors because until we generate the mongoid.yml, rails will still be looking for a database configuration. Let's setup Mongoid now:

Mongoid Setup

First, add the Mongoid gem to your application:

gem 'mongoid', '~> 7.0.6' (or the latest current version)

And run:

$ bundle:install

Now, you have to stop spring:

$ spring stop && spring start

We can now generate the default mongoid configuration file:

$ rails g mongoid:config

To view all the mongoid configuration options, you can view the mongoid docs

Now that mongoid is setup, you can delete the /db folder, the config/database.yml file, and remove the database gem from your Gemfile ( sqlite3, pg, etc. )

Updating Rails Models

Now that you're on Mongoid, you have to update your rails models. A Mongoid User model could look something like this:

class User
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Mongoid::Timestamps

  field Email, type: String
  field Name, type: String

  validates :name, presence: true

  has_many :posts
end

Note that the User class is no longer inheriting from ApplicationRecord.

Testing MongoDB

That's it! Mongoid is all setup. To test your configuration, start the mongodb service:

brew services start mongodb-community@4.2

And test Mongoid in the rails console:

~ rails console
~ u = User.create(email: "john@example.org", name: "john")

To stop mongodb, you can run:

brew services start mongodb-community@4.2

Debugging:

Sometimes Spring tries to load ActiveRecord even when the application has no references to it. If running spring stop && spring start doesn't work, try adding an ActiveRecord adapter such as sqlite3 to your Gemfile so that ActiveRecord can be loaded. You could also try to remove Spring from your application:

$ pkill -f spring
$ spring stop

Edit your Gemfile, removing all references to spring, and reinstall all your gems:

$ bundle install --redownload
$ bin/spring binstub –remove –all

Alternatively, you can disable spring locally by adding the following environment variable to your bin/spring file:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

ENV['DISABLE_SPRING'] = '1'
...

For more information about this bug, see the github issue.