Postgrate 🐘

Welcome to Postgrate! This documentation provides a guide to using Postgrate, a simple, intuitive postgres migration tool for node-postgres!

SQL is awesome. There are a lot of great ORMs out there, but this package is for those who prefer raw SQL!

Postgrate provides utility commands to generate raw .sql migration files and corresponding rollback files. Migrations are executed transactionally. The goal is to enable developers to more efficiently create and manage migrations written in .sql.

Installation

$ yarn add postgrate

Basic Usage

After installation, make sure that you have a .env file that looks like this:

PG_DATABASE_URL=<your postgres connection url>

The key defaults to PG_DATABASE_URL, but the dbEnvKey option can be used to set it to anything else.

After installation, run the following command to initialize Postgrate in your project directory and create necessary configuration files:

$ postgrate init

*Note: in the current release of this package, this command is somewhat trivial as running the first migration will perform initialization steps if they haven't already been completed. Note that in all cases, you must run the run command at least once before running the rollback command, otherwise you will encounter an error. Running the init command will create a .postgraterc file with the same defaults as though the init command were never run.*

To create a migration, run:

$ postgrate make <your-migration-name>

In the root of your project directory, you should now see the following:

db
 |_migrations
    |_<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql
 |_rollbacks
     |_rb-<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql

After you write your migration in the .sql migration file, run:

$ postgrate run

You should see the following output:

     Migration <timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql [id: 1] has been executed 🚀

Configuration

As of version 1.1.0, Postgrate supports the use of a configuration file! In the current release, a .postgraterc file in the root of your project directory written in JSON is the supported format.

Here is an example configuration file with the package defaults:

{
  "rootDirectory": "db",
  "migrationsDirectory": "migrations",
  "rollbackDirectory": "rollbacks",
  "autoCreateRollbacks": true,
  "migrationsTableName": "migrations",
  "dbEnvKey": "PG_DATABASE_URL"
}

Although detailed, option names have been chosen to facilitate intuitive understanding of what each parameter does. That said, for completeness' sake, here are some details about each config option:

Configuration Options

• rootDirectory: Override the default directory name.
• migrationsDirectory: Override the default migrations directory name.
• rollbackDirectory: Override the default rollbacks directory name.
• autoCreateRollbacks: Set to true to automatically create rollback files.
• migrationsTableName: Name of the table created in your database.

#

rootDirectory

The rootDirectory option allows you to override the default db directory name that Postgrate creates at the root of your project.

E.g.

"rootDirectory": "database" // then run `$ postgrate make <your-migration-name>`

Output:

database
 |_migrations
    |_<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql
 |_rollbacks
     |_rb-<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql

#

migrationsDirectory

The migrationsDirectory option allows you to override the default migrations directory name that Postgrate creates in the db (or specified as above) directory.

E.g.

"migrationsDirectory": "mg"

Output:

db
 |_mg
    |_<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql
 |_rollbacks
     |_rb-<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql

#

rollbacksDirectory

The rollbacksDirectory option allows you to override the default rollbacks directory name that Postgrate creates in the db (or specified as above) directory.

E.g.

"rollbacksDirectory": "rb"

Output:

db
 |_migrations
    |_<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql
 |_rb
     |_rb-<timestamp>-<your-migration-name>.sql

#

autoCreateRollbacks

The autoCreateRollbacks option can either be true or false. When set to false a rollbacks directory will not be created, regardless of whether the rollbacksDirectory option is set to a custom value.

Note that in this case, should you wish to create a rollback and use the rollback command, rollback files will have to be created manually following the formula shown in the above examples, repeated here for convenience:

rb_<migration-timestamp>-<migration-name>.sql

Essentially, you will need to do the following:

• create a db/rollbacks directory: name it rollbacks or whatever value you assigned to the rollbacksDirectory config parameter
• create a rollback file within the directory and name it rb_ plus the name of the migration file you wish to rollback

#

migrationsTableName

The migrationsTableName option allows you to set a cusom table name in which to store migration records. Make sure that this name does not conflict with other tables in your database. Once set, there is currently no way to update this configuration option within a project.

dbEnvKey

Allows you to set the key used in your .env file. Defaults to PG_DATABASE_URL.

E.g.

"dbEnvKey": "DEV_PG_DATABASE_URL"

Output:

connectionString: process.env.DEV_PG_DATABASE_URL;

Commands

To view a list of commands, run:

$ postgrate help

You should get the following output:

📖 Postgrate CLI 📖
Usage: postgrate <command> [options]

Commands:
  -h,  help      Show help
  -i,  init      Initialize postgrate
  -l,  list      List all migrations
  -m,  make      Create a migration file
  -r,  run       Run all pending migrations
  -rb, rollback  Rollback a migration

Examples:
  $ postgrate -h
  $ postgrate -i
  $ postgrate -l
  $ postgrate -m create-users-table
  $ postgrate -r
  $ postgrate -rb 1