rails3 bigint primary key

Question

I would like to create a bigint (or string or whatever that is not int) typed primary key field under Rails 3.

I have a given structure of data, for example:

things
------
id bigint primary_key
name char(32)

The approach I'm currently trying to push:

create_table :things, :id => false do |t| # That prevents the creation of (id int) PK
  t.integer :id, :limit => 8 # That makes the column type bigint
  t.string :name, :limit => 32
  t.primary_key :id # This is perfectly ignored :-(
end

The column type will be correct, but the primary key option will not be present with sqlite3 and I suspect that this is the case for MySQL too.

Answer 1

Had that myself not long ago and found the answer here: Using Rails, how can I set my primary key to not be an integer-typed column?

You need to set primary_key: false and then use a custom statement before you execute the migration.

EDIT 1: You need to check your database docs for the exact query to perform. It is executed as a regular SQL statement and needs to be database specific. The example in the question I referred to is for Postgre SQL. If you are on MySQL you might have to change that.