Solid Queue in new Rails 8 project

When trying to set up Solid Queue in a new Rails 8 project, I followed what seemed like the obvious steps:

1. Created a new Rails 8 project
2. Ran rails db:migrate
3. Tried to start Solid Queue with rails solid_queue:start

However, I kept getting this error:

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Could not find table 'solid_queue_processes'

Even after running migrations, the necessary tables weren’t being created. What gives?

The Solution

It turns out that the key to getting Solid Queue working in Rails 8 is to set it up similar to how you would in production, with separate databases for different concerns (data, cache, queue, etc.).

1. First configure your config/database.yml to include a separate queue database:

development:
  primary:
    <<: *default
    database: storage/development.sqlite3
  queue:
    <<: *default
    database: storage/development_queue.sqlite3
    migrations_paths: db/queue_migrate

2. Now run rails db:migrate and this will create all the tables in queue database
3. Lastly, point Solid Queue to the new database by adding the following lines into environments/development.rb

config.active_job.queue_adapter = :solid_queue
config.solid_queue.connects_to = { database: { writing: :queue } }

This explicitly tells Solid Queue which database to use for its operations.

Start Job Processing

Finally start queue processing by running:

bin/jobs start

Happy queueing! 😀