Yes, renaming a Rails application isn’t something that you’ll do often. But when you do have to do it, you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as easy as just changing the name in a file or two. Your application name is spread out through a few dozen files including environment configs, initializers, routes and our application.rb file.

Luckily you don’t have to remember which files to change. Morshed Alam created a gem (appropriately named Rename) that handles the grunt work for you. Rename goes through your app and performs a gsub where appropriate.

To Rename Your Application

Add this line to your Gemfile:

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gem "rename"

Rename the app:

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rails g rename:app_to NEW_NAME

This will rename the app in all of these files:

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config.ru
Gemfile
Gemfile.lock
Rakefile
README.rdoc
config/application.rb
config/boot.rb
config/environment.rb
config/environments/development.rb
config/environments/production.rb
config/environments/test.rb
config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb
config/initializers/filter_parameter_logging.rb
config/initializers/inflections.rb
config/initializers/mime_types.rb
config/initializers/secret_token.rb
config/initializers/session_store.rb
config/initializers/wrap_parameters.rb
config/routes.rb
config/initializers/session_store.rb

You’ll probably want to rename your databases while you are at it.

For Postgresql, log into psql and then:

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ALTER DATABASE db_name RENAME TO new_db_name;

Enjoy!