Here is small idea I’ve had for sometime that I quickly knocked up yesterday.

Generators are great but we have all had those “Oops!” moments where you realised that what you created was not quite what you wanted to do. Enter script/generate undo….

script/generate model WrongName

  exists  app/models/
  exists  test/unit/
  exists  test/fixtures/
  create  app/models/wrong_name.rb
  create  test/unit/wrong\_name_test.rb
  create  test/fixtures/wrong\_names.yml
  exists  db/migrate
  create  db/migrate/001\_create\_wrong\_names.rb

.. ….

oops.. didn’t want to do that.

script/generate undo
Undo'ing: model WrongName

notempty  db/migrate
notempty  db
      rm  db/migrate/001\_create\_wrong_names.rb
      rm  test/fixtures/wrong\_names.yml
      rm  test/unit/wrong\_name_test.rb
      rm  app/models/wrong\_name.rb
notempty  test/fixtures
notempty  test
notempty  test/unit
notempty  test
notempty  app/models
notempty  app

Under the hood all it is doing is keeping a log of your generator history (see /log/generator.log). When undo is called it looks at the last log entry and passes it onto script/destroy. Pretty simple stuff but it saves you having to remember what it was that you typed previously.

The patch as it stands is pretty rough and ready. I’m posting this here to get some feedback to gauge whether it’s worth pursuing further.

UPDATE Plugin on the way. I’ve created a new project on Rubyforge for any plugins I make – it should be setup soon. (just waiting for approval)

UPDATE 2: Plugin now released. See this post