To add to this, the schema.rb or structure.sql files rails makes are never 'accurate'. By which I mean, they simply record the state of the database at the time

To add to this, the schema.rb or structure.sql files rails makes are never 'accurate'. By which I mean, they simply record the state of the database at the time of the last migration. If you are switching between branches, for instance, it will have columns from both branches. We gitignore schema.rb because it is really useless. It's a performance optimization that causes more trouble than its worth.