Consistency Fail

Description

consistency_fail is a tool to detect missing unique indexes in Rails projects.

With more than one application server, validates_uniqueness_of becomes a lie. Two app servers -> two requests -> two near-simultaneous uniqueness checks -> two processes that commit to the database independently, violating this faux constraint. You'll need a database-level constraint for cases like these.

consistency_fail will find your missing unique indexes, so you can add them and stop ignoring the C in ACID.

Similar problems arise with has_one, so consistency_fail finds places where database-level enforcement is lacking there as well.

For more detail, see my blog post on the subject.

Installation

You can install the gem directly:

gem install consistency_fail

Or if you're using Bundler (which you probably are), add it to your Gemfile.

gem 'consistency_fail'

Limitations

The master branch should work for the following ActiveRecord versions:

• 5.x
• 4.x (has a known issue around views)
• 3.x
• 2.3 (on the rails-2.3 branch)

The known issue with views in ActiveRecord 4.x is that in this version, the connection adapter's tables method includes both tables and views. This means that without additional monkeypatches to the various connection adapters, we cannot reliably detect whether a given model is backed by a table or a view. I wouldn't mind monkeypatching a bounded set of adapters, but I don't want to be on the hook for arbitrary connection adapters that may require licenses to test (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle).

consistency_fail depends on being able to find all your ActiveRecord::Base subclasses with some $LOAD_PATH trickery. If any models are in a path either not on your project's load path or in a path that doesn't include the word "models", consistency_fail won't be able to find or analyze them. I'm open to making the text "models" configurable if people want that. Please open an issue or pull request if so!

Usage

The normal run mode is to generate a report of the problematic spots in your application. From your Rails project directory, run:

consistency_fail

from your terminal / shell. This will spit a report to standard output, which you can view directly, redirect to a file as evidence to embarrass a teammate, or simply beam in happiness at your application's perfect record for validates_uniqueness_of and has_one usage.

The somewhat more sinister and awesome run mode is to include an initializer that does this:

require 'consistency_fail/enforcer'
ConsistencyFail::Enforcer.enforce!

This will make it so that you can't save or load any ActiveRecord models until you go back and add your unique indexes. Of course, you'll need to make it so Rails can find consistency_fail/enforcer by having consistency_fail in your Gemfile, or by some other mechanism.

This mega-fail mode is nice to have if you have a large team and want to ensure that new models or validations/associations follow the rules.

If you're using the Enforcer, depending on your project, you may need to delay the initializer until later, so that model files can be loaded only once gem dependencies have been satisfied. One possible way is to move the code above to the end of environment.rb or to the more specific config/environment/* files.

Using with Guard

There is a guard integration plugin available. See guard-consistency_fail.

License

Released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for further details.