ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished in Rails 3.1 on Heroku

ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished in Rails 3.1 on Heroku

We have a simple application that doesn’t have an ActiveRecord dependency. It’s deployed to Heroku, and it’s been working fine on Rails 3.0.x since April 2011. We knew we weren’t using ActiveRecord for database connectivity, but we let it be, since it wasn’t causing any issues.

When upgrading to Rails 3.1, we found that every single page would giveActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished on our staging environment on Heroku. The same error didn’t happen in development. Although we might have been able to getgem 'pg' set up and working, we really didn’t need an ActiveRecord dependency at all.

I found part of a solution on StackOverflow, but it needed a little tweaking for Rails 3.1.0.

# File: config/application.rb

# Pick the frameworks you want:
# require "active_record/railtie"
require "action_controller/railtie"
require "action_mailer/railtie"
require "active_resource/railtie"
require "sprockets/railtie"
require "rails/test_unit/railtie"

That’s what Rails 3.1.0 generates when running rails new myproject --skip-active-record. (Note that require "active_record/railtie" is commented out.) This solved our ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished problem, but gave us a few others, namely:

• Fixtures
• ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound (used for 404s)

Fixtures

There’s some normal stuff to get rid of in terms of spec_helper.rb and/ortest_helper.rb. Here’s an example:

# File spec/spec_helper.rb

# # If you're not using ActiveRecord, or you'd prefer not to run each of your
# # examples within a transaction, remove the following line or assign false
# # instead of true.
# config.use_transactional_fixtures = true

You may have others. Tarantula had to be adjusted for us, for example.

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, however, was an interesting problem. Everything worked fine without ActiveRecord except the places where we were usingActiveRecord::RecordNotFound to give a HTTP 404 to the user agent. That seems strange in a lot of ways, because a 404 shouldn’t have anything to do with your chosen ORM. My first intuition was to do require 'active_record/errors' (see also the Rails docs), but that caused problems with assumptions in 'rspec/rails'.

Right now, the below is what we ended up with:

# File: config/application.rb

# Pick the frameworks you want:
# require "active_record/railtie"
require "action_controller/railtie"
require "action_mailer/railtie"
require "active_resource/railtie"
require "sprockets/railtie"
require "rails/test_unit/railtie"

# For errors like ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
require "active_record"

Our automated tests (Rspec, integration tests, Tarantula, Selenium, etc) all pass with it and we no longer get ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished, but we still have an ActiveRecord dependency I don’t like. (There must be another error we can raise — I don’t entirely like the render '/404.html', status: 404 solution for several reasons.)