Skip to main content

migra: PostgreSQL migrations made almost painless

migra is a schema diff tool for PostgreSQL. Use it to compare database schemas or autogenerate migration scripts. Use it in your python scripts, or from the command line like this:

$ migra postgresql:///a postgresql:///b
alter table "public"."products" add column newcolumn text;

alter table "public"."products" add constraint "x" CHECK ((price > (0)::numeric));

migra magically figures out all the statements required to get from A to B.

You can also detect changes for a single specific schema only with --schema myschema.

Folks, schemas are good

Schema migrations are without doubt the most cumbersome and annoying part of working with SQL databases. So much so that some people think that schemas themselves are bad!

But schemas are actually good. Enforcing data consistency and structure is a good thing. It’s the migration tooling that is bad, because it’s harder to use than it should be. migra is an attempt to change that, and make migrations easy, safe, and reliable instead of something to dread.

Migra supports PostgreSQL >= 9.4. Known issues exist with earlier versions.

Full documentation

Documentation is at migra.djrobstep.com.

How it Works

Think of migra as a diff tool for schemas. Suppose database A and database B have similar but slightly different schemas. migra will detect the differences and output the SQL needed to transform A to B.

This includes changes to tables, views, functions, indexes, constraints, enums, sequences, and installed extensions.

You can also use migra as a library to build your own migration scripts, tools, and custom migration flows.

With migra, a typical database migration is a simple three step process.

  1. Autogenerate:

     $ migra --unsafe postgresql:///a postgresql:///b > migration_script.sql
    
  2. Review (and tweak if necessary).

     # If you need to move data about during your script, you can add those changes to your script.
    
  3. Apply:

     $ psql a --single-transaction -f migration_script.sql
    

Migration complete!

IMPORTANT: Practice safe migrations

Migrations can never be fully automatic. As noted above ALWAYS REVIEW MIGRATION SCRIPTS CAREFULLY, ESPECIALLY WHEN DROPPING TABLES IS INVOLVED.

Migra manages schema changes but not your data. If you need to move data around, as part of a migration, you'll need to handle that by editing the script or doing it separately before/after the schema changes.

Best practice is to run your migrations against a copy of your production database first. This helps verify correctness and spot any performance issues before they cause interruptions and downtime on your production database.

migra will deliberately throw an error if any generated statements feature the word "drop". This safety feature is by no means idiot-proof, but might prevent a few obvious blunders.

If you want to generate "drop ..." statements, you need to use the --unsafe flag if using the command, or if using the python package directly, set_safety( to false on your Migration object.

Python Code

Here's how the migra command is implemented under the hood (with a few irrelevant lines removed).

As you can see, it's pretty simple (S here is a context manager that creates a database session from a database URL).

from migra import Migration
from sqlbag import S

with S(args.dburl_from) as s0, S(args.dburl_target) as s1:
    m = Migration(s0, s1)

    if args.unsafe:
        m.set_safety(False)

    m.add_all_changes()
    print(m.sql)

Here the code just opens connections to both databases for the Migration object to analyse. m.add_all_changes() generates the SQL statements for the changes required, and adds to the migration object's list of pending changes. The necessary SQL is now available as a property.

Features and Limitations

migra plays nicely with extensions. Schema contents belonging to extensions will be ignored and left to the extension to manage.

New: migra now plays nicely with view dependencies too, and will drop/create them in the correct order.

Only SQL/PLPGSQL functions are confirmed to work so far. migra ignores functions that use other languages.

Installation

Assuming you have pip, all you need to do is install as follows:

$ pip install migra

If you don't have psycopg2-binary (the PostgreSQL driver) installed yet, you can install this at the same time with:

$ pip install migra[pg]

Contributing

Contributing is easy. Jump into the issues, find a feature or fix you'd like to work on, and get involved. Or create a new issue and suggest something completely different. Beginner-friendly issues are tagged "good first issue", and if you're unsure about any aspect of the process, just ask.

Credits

Metadata

Release files for migra 1.0.1540800905

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for migra 1.0.1540800905
File Size Uploaded
migra-1.0.1540800905.tar.gz 10.2 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for migra 1.0.1540800905
File Interpreter ABI Platform
migra-1.0.1540800905-py2.py3-none-any.whl Python 2, Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 32.8 kB

Release files / migra-1.0.1540800905.tar.gz

Download URL migra-1.0.1540800905.tar.gz
Size 10.2 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
384859e2a17aa05aad293cc90a496d54b0cfc183364320610ec8ef81f4ec5449
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
893251e859d56920ee2b20493aa90a7ec26537f7765443804c5fbb313c5f99d1
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via poetry/0.12.5 CPython/3.7.0 Linux/4.4.0-137-generic

Release files / migra-1.0.1540800905-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL migra-1.0.1540800905-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size 22.6 kB
Tags Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
5ad08d3f27559be201a90363e9174553b6b8008fbba5dce7448d958e3a3a533b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
79801d764d5dfd8c56eb9a7ee589a63ec824260440fe9e0f7d338d012507f864
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via poetry/0.12.5 CPython/3.7.0 Linux/4.4.0-137-generic

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

1.0.1540800905 This release

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page