nullalign is a tool to detect missing non-null constraints in Rails projects.

Suppose you have a validation like this:

validates :email, presence: true

Do you have a non-null constraint in your database to back that up? If not, nullalign will find it for you.

Nullalign is based on Colin Jones' consistency_fail. I mean really really based on it, as in I copied and pasted over a bunch of the code and changed the module and file names. And a lot of this README, too.

Put this in the development group in your Gemfile

gem 'nullalign'

Run it like this:

bundle exec nullalign

There are presence validators that aren't backed by non-null constraints.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model              Table Columns
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Album              albums: name, owner_id
AttendanceRecord   attendance_records: group_id, attended_at
CheckinLabel       checkin_labels: name, xml
CheckinTime        checkin_times: campus

You can also run a Rake task which will generate a migration which will add indexes as needed:

bundle exec rake nullalign:fix

nullalign depends on being able to find all your ActiveRecord::Base subclasses with some $LOAD_PATH trickery. If any models are in a path either not on your project's load path or in a path that doesn't include the word "models", nullalign won't be able to find or analyze them. I'm open to making the text "models" configurable if people want that. Please open an issue or pull request if so!

To disable nullalign, I could add a thing that checks column comments for a string like 'nonullalign' if people think that would be useful. Just let me know.

• Tom Copeland - author
• Denny Mueller - fix for ActiveStorage compatibility issue
• Woongcheol Yang - support for conditional validations
• Paweł Dąbrowski - Rake task suggestion

You can run the tests with:

bundle exec rspec

Released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for further details.