Dbmate is a database migration tool, to keep your database schema in sync across multiple developers and your production servers.

It is a standalone command line tool, which can be used with Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any other language or framework you are using to write database-backed applications. This is especially helpful if you are writing many services in different languages, and want to maintain some sanity with consistent development tools.

For a comparison between dbmate and other popular database schema migration tools, please see the Alternatives table.

• Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.
• Powerful, purpose-built DSL for writing schema migrations.
• Migrations are timestamp-versioned, to avoid version number conflicts with multiple developers.
• Migrations are run atomically inside a transaction.
• Supports creating and dropping databases (handy in development/test).
• Database connection URL is definied using an environment variable (DATABASE_URL by default), or specified on the command line.
• Built-in support for reading environment variables from your .env file.
• Easy to distribute, single self-contained binary.

OSX

Install using Homebrew:

$ brew tap amacneil/dbmate
$ brew install dbmate

Linux

Download the binary directly:

$ sudo curl -fsSL -o /usr/local/bin/dbmate https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate/releases/download/v1.2.1/dbmate-linux-amd64
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/dbmate

Heroku

To use dbmate on Heroku, the easiest method is to store the linux binary in your git repository:

$ mkdir -p bin
$ curl -fsSL -o bin/dbmate-heroku https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate/releases/download/v1.2.1/dbmate-linux-amd64
$ chmod +x bin/dbmate-heroku
$ git add bin/dbmate-heroku
$ git commit -m "Add dbmate binary"
$ git push heroku master

You can now run dbmate on heroku:

$ heroku run bin/dbmate-heroku up

Other

Dbmate can be installed directly using go get:

$ go get -u github.com/amacneil/dbmate

dbmate           # print help
dbmate new       # generate a new migration file
dbmate up        # create the database (if it does not already exist) and run any pending migrations
dbmate create    # create the database
dbmate drop      # drop the database
dbmate migrate   # run any pending migrations
dbmate rollback  # roll back the most recent migration
dbmate down      # alias for rollback

Dbmate locates your database using the DATABASE_URL environment variable by default. If you are writing a twelve-factor app, you should be storing all connection strings in environment variables.

To make this easy in development, dbmate looks for a .env file in the current directory, and treats any variables listed there as if they were specified in the current environment (existing environment variables take preference, however).

If you do not already have a .env file, create one and add your database connection URL:

$ cat .env
DATABASE_URL="postgres://[email protected]:5432/myapp_development?sslmode=disable"

DATABASE_URL should be specified in the following format:

protocol://username:password@host:port/database_name?options

• protocol must be one of mysql, postgres, postgresql, sqlite, sqlite3
• host can be either a hostname or IP address
• options are driver-specific (refer to the underlying Go SQL drivers if you wish to use these)

MySQL

DATABASE_URL="mysql://username:[email protected]:3306/database_name"

PostgreSQL

When connecting to Postgres, you may need to add the sslmode=disable option to your connection string, as dbmate by default requires a TLS connection (some other frameworks/languages allow unencrypted connections by default).

DATABASE_URL="postgres://username:[email protected]:5432/database_name?sslmode=disable"

SQLite

SQLite databases are stored on the filesystem, so you do not need to specify a host. By default, files are relative to the current directory. For example, the following will create a database at ./db/database_name.sqlite3:

DATABASE_URL="sqlite:///db/database_name.sqlite3"

To specify an absolute path, add an additional forward slash to the path. The following will create a database at /tmp/database_name.sqlite3:

DATABASE_URL="sqlite:////tmp/database_name.sqlite3"

To create a new migration, run dbmate new create_users_table. You can name the migration anything you like. This will create a file db/migrations/20151127184807_create_users_table.sql in the current directory:

-- migrate:up

-- migrate:down

To write a migration, simply add your SQL to the migrate:up section:

-- migrate:up
create table users (
  id integer,
  name varchar(255),
  email varchar(255) not null
);

-- migrate:down

Note: Migration files are named in the format [version]_[description].sql. Only the version (defined as all leading numeric characters in the file name) is recorded in the database, so you can safely rename a migration file without having any effect on its current application state.

Run dbmate up to run any pending migrations.

$ dbmate up
Creating: myapp_development
Applying: 20151127184807_create_users_table.sql

Note: dbmate up will create the database if it does not already exist (assuming the current user has permission to create databases). If you want to run migrations without creating the database, run dbmate migrate.

By default, dbmate doesn't know how to roll back a migration. In development, it's often useful to be able to revert your database to a previous state. To accomplish this, implement the migrate:down section:

-- migrate:up
create table users (
  id integer,
  name varchar(255),
  email varchar(255) not null
);

-- migrate:down
drop table users;

Run dbmate rollback to roll back the most recent migration:

$ dbmate rollback
Rolling back: 20151127184807_create_users_table.sql

The following command line options are available with all commands. You must use command line arguments in the order dbmate [global options] command [command options].

• --migrations-dir, -d "./db/migrations" - where to keep the migration files.
• --env, -e "DATABASE_URL" - specify an environment variable to read the database connection URL from.

For example, before running your test suite, you may wish to drop and recreate the test database. One easy way to do this is to store your test database connection URL in the TEST_DATABASE_URL environment variable:

$ cat .env
TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres://[email protected]:5432/myapp_test?sslmode=disable"

You can then specify this environment variable in your test script (Makefile or similar):

$ dbmate -e TEST_DATABASE_URL drop
Dropping: myapp_test
$ dbmate -e TEST_DATABASE_URL up
Creating: myapp_test
Applying: 20151127184807_create_users_table.sql

How do I use dbmate under Alpine linux?

Alpine linux uses musl libc, which is incompatible with how we build SQLite support (using cgo). If you want Alpine linux support, and don't mind sacrificing SQLite support, please use the dbmate-linux-musl-amd64 build found on the releases page.

Why another database schema migration tool? Dbmate was inspired by many other tools, primarily Rails' ActiveRecord, with the goals of being trivial to configure, and language & framework independent. Here is a comparison between dbmate and other popular migration tools.

✴️ In theory these tools could be used with other languages, but a Go development environment is required because binary builds are not provided.

If you notice any inaccuracies in this table, please propose a change.

Dbmate is written in Go, pull requests are welcome.

Tests are run against a real database using docker-compose. First, install the Docker Toolbox.

Make sure you have docker running:

$ docker-machine start default && eval "$(docker-machine env default)"

To build a docker image and run the tests:

$ make

To run just the lint and tests (without completely rebuilding the docker image):

$ make lint test