Rails Rollback to Specific Migration

Occassionally, when working on an app with a lot of active branches that affect the database I run into an issue where I can’t rollback.

I’ll get an error like this:

rails aborted! ActiveRecord::UnknownMigrationVersionError:

No migration with version number 20230620205505.

This usually happens when I switch to another branch and I want to rollback a change I made to update/remove the migration. I assume the migration referenced in database doesn’t exist on the current branch.

If this happens, you can roll back to the last migration on the branch with:

rails db:migrate:down VERSION=n

where n is the timestamp from the latest migration (something like 20230607135355).

This is only applicable for non-sqlite3 databases, since the database doesn’t live in the project directory.

• Rails Guide
• SO answer