The `$rake db:*` commands and initializing a Discourse instance

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First off, thank you to the devs for creating such a great app!

I am hoping I might be able to get something clarified that has me confused. I was under the impression that the proper way to use $ rake db:* commands in Rails 6 for initialization was by doing $ rake db:prepare but discourse won’t initialize properly if I do $ rake db:prepare by itself. And from the discussions on Meta/here; I see that prepare only seems to be used for initializing test data and maybe somewhere in the background tasks that are run.

Could someone please help me understand if $ rake db:migrate is the only command I need to initialize discourse’s database for db migrations or initializations and why this is the case?

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I think you need to db:create first, then migrate.

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Like Michael said, the database has to exist. I regularly do

   rake db:drop db:create db:migrate

to reset to a fresh database (when I’ve forgotten to save a backup of a fresh install!).

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I think the build process must default to doing db:create because unless I’m missing some functionality in my instance the instance appears to be working with only assets precompile (or something) and migrate.

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After some digging it appears this is more information on the answer I was looking for:

Discourse’s rake tasks are overriding the rails db:migrate. I believe this can be considered unorthodox by Rails apps, e.g. this PR: Add db:prepare rake task. by robertomiranda · Pull Request #35768 · rails/rails · GitHub. Looking at what db:prepare does, it directly accesses ActiveRecord and does the expected DB setup but it does not call the other necessary individual db:* tasks one might expect it to because it overrides parts that are expected to be their from the upstream.

And a side note: The way I currently have discourse set up does not allow the discourse db user to ever have escalated privileges so having to do things like db:drop and db:create after building seems it will require a slight config change from what I implemented.