Rails: Is it bad to have an irreversible migration?

Question

When is it acceptable to raise an ActiveRecord::IrreversibleMigration exception in the self.down method of a migration? When should you take the effort to actually implemen

Answer 1

In a production scenario, you should always make the effort to write and test a reversible migration in the eventuality that you go through it in production, then discover a bug which forces you to roll back (code and schema) to some previous revision (pending some non-trivial fix -- and an otherwise unusable production system.)

Having a reversible migration is fine for development and staging, but assuming well tested code it should be extremely rare that you would ever want to migrate down in production. I build into my migrations an automatic IrreversibleMigration in production mode. If I really needed to reverse a change, I could use another "up" migration or remove the exception. That seems sketchy though. Any bug that would cause a scenario this dire is a sign that the QA process is seriously screwed up.