How do I make a column unique and index it in a Ruby on Rails migration?

rails generate migration add_index_to_table_name column_name:uniq

or

rails generate migration add_column_name_to_table_name column_name:string:uniq:index

generates

class AddIndexToModerators < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :moderators, :username, :string
    add_index :moderators, :username, unique: true
  end
end

If you're adding an index to an existing column, remove or comment the add_column line, or put in a check

add_column :moderators, :username, :string unless column_exists? :moderators, :username

The short answer for old versions of Rails (see other answers for Rails 4+):

add_index :table_name, :column_name, unique: true

To index multiple columns together, you pass an array of column names instead of a single column name,

add_index :table_name, [:column_name_a, :column_name_b], unique: true

If you get "index name... is too long", you can add name: "whatever" to the add_index method to make the name shorter.

For fine-grained control, there's a "execute" method that executes straight SQL.

That's it!

If you are doing this as a replacement for regular old model validations, check to see how it works. The error reporting to the user will likely not be as nice without model-level validations. You can always do both.