Change foreign key column name in rails

Question

I have a Project migration class like this:

class CreateProjects < ActiveRecord::Migration
 def change
  create_table :projects do |t|
   t.string :title
   t.text :description
   t.boolean :public
   t.references :user, index: true, foreign_key: true

   t.timestamps null: false
  end
 end
end

It creates a column name user_id in projects table but I want to name the column owner_id so I can use project.owner instead of project.user.

Answer 1

You can do it two ways:

#app/models/project.rb
class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :owner, class_name: "User", foreign_key: :user_id
end 

OR

$ rails g migration ChangeForeignKeyForProjects

# db/migrate/change_foreign_key_for_projects.rb
class ChangeForeignKeyForProjects < ActiveRecord::Migration
   def change
      rename_column :projects, :user_id, :owner_id
   end
end

then:

$ rake db:migrate