Matt Harrison wrote: > So on the development database, it's safe to add the columns or whatever > manually, update the migration to reflect the changes and test/code as > usual. Then when the production deployment happens it uses the > migrations from scratch? Not safe to add columns "manually". Add them to your migrations, rake db:migrate:reset to rebuild your databases, manually test, deploy, and lock down those migrations. The deploy script will migrate on the server, so all your existing data don't get erased!