Setting up Hasura migrations¶

Introduction¶

If you don’t already use any tool to manage your Postgres schema, you can use Hasura to do that for you. Hasura has a CLI which will help you save each action that you do on the console, including creating tables/views and schema modifying SQL statements, as SQL files. These files are called migrations and they can be applied and rolled back step-by-step. These files can be version controlled and can be used with your CI/CD system to make incremental updates.

Let’s say we have the following two tables in our schema:

author (id uuid, name text, rating integer)
article (id uuid, title text, content text, author_id uuid)

Now we want to set up migrations starting with this schema.

Step 0: Disable the console on the server¶

To use migrations effectively, the console on the server (which is served at /console) should be disabled and all changes must go through the console served by the CLI. Otherwise, changes could be made through the server console and they will not be tracked by migrations.

So, the first step is to disable the console served by the GraphQL engine server. In order to do that, remove the --enable-console flag from the command that starts the server or set the following environment variable to false:

HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE=false

Step 1: Install the Hasura CLI¶

Follow the instructions in Installing the Hasura CLI.

Step 2: Set up a project directory¶

For the endpoint referred here, let’s say you’ve deployed the GraphQL engine on Hasura Cloud, then this endpoint is: https://my-graphql.hasura.app. In case you’ve deployed Hasura using Docker, the URL might be http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080. In any case, the endpoint should not contain the v1/graphql API path. It should just be the hostname and any sub-path if it is configured that way.

Let’s set up a project directory by executing the following command:

hasura init my-project --endpoint http://my-graphql.hasura.app

cd my-project

This will create a new directory called my-project with a config.yaml file, a migrations directory and a metadata directory. This directory structure is mandatory to use Hasura migrations.

# in project dir

# initialize version control
git init

# commit initial project status
git add .
git commit -m "hasura project init"

Step 3: Initialize the migrations and metadata as per your current state¶

If you have already set up your database and GraphQL API, you need to initialize your database migrations and Hasura metadata with the current state of the database.

# create migration files (note that this will only export the public schema from postgres)
hasura migrate create "init" --from-server

# note down the version

# mark the migration as applied on this server
hasura migrate apply --version "<version>" --skip-execution

hasura migrate create "init" --from-server --schema "public" --schema "schema1" --schema "schema2"

# export the metadata
hasura metadata export

# in project dir
git add .
git commit -m "initialize migrations and metadata"

Step 4: Use the console from the CLI¶

From this point onwards, instead of using the console at http://my-graphql.hasura.app/console you should use the console from the CLI by running:

# in project dir
hasura console

Step 5: Add a new table and see how migrations and metadata is updated¶

As you use the Hasura console UI served by the CLI to make changes to your schema, database migration files are automatically generated in the migrations/ directory and the metadata is exported in the metadata/ directory of your project.

Let’s create the following table address (id uuid, street text, zip text, city text, country text, author_id int) and then create a foreign-key to the author table via the author_id -> id columns.

In the migrations directory, we can find new directories called <timestamp>_create_table_public_address and <timestamp>_set_fk_public_address_author_id containing an up.sql and a down.sql migration files for the changes we made.

You can also go ahead and add permissions and create relationships for the address table. The related metadata changes will automatically be exported into the metadata directory.

Step 6: Squash migrations and add checkpoints to version control¶

As you keep using the console via the CLI to make changes to the schema, new migration files will keep getting generated and the metadata files will keep getting updated automatically.

Typically while adding a feature a lot of incremental migration files get created for each of the small tasks that you did to achieve the feature. To improve maintainability of the migration files and to ensure you can go back to a particular version of the metadata, it is recommended that you squash your migration files and commit the project status in version control whenever you reach a logical checkpoint in your feature development.

The following command will squash all migration files from the given migration to the latest migration into a single migration file.

hasura migrate squash --name "<feature-name>" --from <start-migration-version>

# note down the version

# mark the squashed migration as applied on this server
hasura migrate apply --version "<squash-migration-version>" --skip-execution

Commit the project status into version control.

# in project dir
git add .
git commit -m "<feature-name>"

Step 7: Apply the migrations and metadata on another instance of the GraphQL engine¶

Apply all migrations present in the migrations/ directory and the metadata present in the metadata/ directory on a new instance at http://another-graphql-instance.hasura.app:

# in project dir
hasura migrate apply --endpoint http://another-graphql-instance.hasura.app
hasura metadata apply --endpoint http://another-graphql-instance.hasura.app

In case you need an automated way of applying the migrations and metadata, take a look at the cli-migrations Docker image, which can start the GraphQL engine after automatically applying the migrations and metadata which are mounted onto directories.

If you now open the console of the new instance, you can see that the three tables have been created and are tracked:

Step 8: Check the status of migrations¶

# in project dir
hasura migrate status

This command will print out each migration version present in the migrations directory along with its name, source status and database status.

For example,

$ hasura migrate status
VERSION        NAME                           SOURCE STATUS  DATABASE STATUS
1590493510167  init                           Present        Present
1590497881360  create_table_public_address    Present        Present

Such a migration status indicates that there are 2 migration versions in the local directory and both of them are applied on the database.

If SOURCE STATUS indicates Not Present, it means that the migration version is present on the server, but not on the current user’s local directory. This typically happens if multiple people are collaborating on a project and one of the collaborators forgot to pull the latest changes which included the latest migration files, or another collaborator forgot to push the latest migration files that were applied on the database. Syncing of the files would fix the issue.

If DATABASE STATUS indicates Not Present, it denotes that there are new migration versions in the local directory which are not applied on the database yet. Executing hasura migrate apply will resolve this.