Database migrations can be easily integrated into your deploy system, running as a decoupled process, so it can be replaced anytime by other tools if needed, and working with it without interfering with the project itself.
The entire process can be isolated into a Docker container or the tools can be all installed directly on your machine. Presented setup is for CentOS.
Let’s assume the following context:
– Machine to run the migrations from (with Docker installed)
– MySQL database with access from the machine mentioned above
– A secrets manager to keep the database access credentials safe
– Git repository holding the migration files included (there will be a directory with all the migration files in the proper format).
– Private SSH key to access the above mentioned repository
Every time you deploy your app, you could run all the migrations you committed to your repository. Your deploy system should trigger the migration tool at the proper moment.
The key in this setup is migrate, a flexible tool which I had no problems with.
As presented in this Dockerfile, there are different tools used to perform each required step:
– Get migration files from the repository
– Get a secret string with database credentials from the secrets manager
– Extract the database credentials from the secret string
– Execute the migrations
Take a look at the full setup on GitHub.