ActiveMigration

Finally, Migrations!

Migrations are a concept of getting your persistence layer into a consistent state. Over the time you are developing your application, your persistence architecture might change, additonal tables or columns might be added. Here, ActiveMigration comes into play: ActiveMigration provides you an easy way to migrate your database, also respecting different environments (development, production or any environment you can think of).

Migrating

For migration, this package comes with a built in tool: The migrator.dart-script. This script enables you to simply migrate a single migration or a folder with subfolders full of migrations. To get help about how to use the tool, simply type

dart migrator.dart -h

and the help for the tool will be displayed. Usually, the tool takes three arguments:

• The environment, in which the migration should happen
• The location of the database.yml file
• A single migration or a folder full of migrations

The environment

The environment specifies, which adapter and settings should be loaded from the database.yml file.

The database.yml file

Here, you may specify your adapters and also connection parameters which are needed in order to connect to your adapter. Here an example file:

development:
  adapter: postgres
  username: dartman
  password: password
  host: localhost
  port: 5432
  database: dartbase

The migration file(s)

The last and most important point are the migration files. Migration files have a standardized structure: First, there is a comment containing the timestamp of when the migration was created in milliseconds. Second, there has to be a class, which is also contained in the name of the migration file. Then there are the migration up- and down methods, up for if the migration should be done and down if it should be undone. In order to be able to create migration files easily, ActiveMigration comes with another tool: The ActiveMigration generator.dart.

Generating

Migrations can be easily generated with the generator.dart script. This script needs one or two arguments:

• Name of the Migration
• Location of the Migration, optional

This generates the Migration with the specified name at the specified location. If no location was specified, the Migration will be created at the place from where you ran the generator script.

Installing the tools

It would be quite lame if you had to type dart generator.dart (arguments here), as well as dart migrator.dart (arguments) everytime. For this reason, I created an installer, makes the tools available via the amg command. You're then able to use amg generate or amg migrate, which then hands over the arguments to the different tools. To install the tools under linux, simply paste this line into your terminal and execute it:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Adracus/ActiveMigration/master/bin/install.sh | sudo bash