Is it a good idea to purge old Rails migration files?

Question

I have been running a big Rails application for over 2 years and, day by day, my ActiveRecord migration folder has been growing up to over 150 files.

There are very old models, no longer available in the application, still referenced in the migrations. I was thinking to remove them.

What do you think? Do you usually purge old migrations from your codebase?

Answer 1

The Rails 4 Way page 177: Sebastian says...

A little-known fact is that you can remove old migration files (while still keeping newer ones) to keep the db/migrate folder to a manageable size. You can move the older migrations to a db/archived_migrations folder or something like that. Once you do trim the size of your migrations folder, use the rake db:reset task to (re-)create your database from db/schema.rb and load the seeds into your current environment.

Answer 2

Once I hit a major site release, I'll roll the migrations into one and start fresh. I feel dirty once the migration version numbers get up around 75.