I am new to using Laravel, and I'm currently learning about Laravel's database migration and seeding features.
It's working with the command prompt, but I can migrate and seed in phpMyAdmin as well. What are the advantages and disadvantages of migrating and seeding within Laravel as opposed to phpMyAdmin?
From Laravel docs on Migrations & Seeding:
Migrations are a type of version control for your database. They allow a team to modify the database schema and stay up to date on the current schema state.
A simple search for why database migration also gives me some pretty decent results. One of the easiest to understand is a page by FlywayDB (I have no idea who they are until I search this term up):
Database migrations are a great way to regain control of this mess. They allow you to:
Recreate a database from scratch
Make it clear at all times what state a database is in
Migrate in a deterministic way from your current version of the database to a newer one
The illustration they made perhaps explain it more clearly, so you may want to check it out.
Related
We are looking to implement Continuous Integration using Circle CI but we are not sure on how should we proceed with our test database. We have the following alternatives in mind:
Run the migrations from scratch (the problem is that we have a lot of migration files, our first migrations were moving everything from MySQL and PostgreSQL and using a legacy database, so, it's rather complex).
Recreate the current DB and have a .sql file that will create our current tables, and then, we create a seeder to fill the information that we need.
But we are not sure which is the best alternative or if we're missing something?
Thank you
I have a database and I would like to generate migration based on tables that already exists.
How can I do that?
I am running linux ubuntu 16.10 + Mariadb and laravel 5.4
A quick Google shows many packages that will do just this sort of thing for you, like migrations-generator.
You'll probably want to go over any generated migrations as well just to make sure they match what you're after.
I have been working with Laravel for about a couple of months now - loving it. Have a question about the workflow that is recommended for managing changes to the database.
I have a test database that I used to develop my app, and when I was reasonably happy, I created a production database by copying the structure in phpMyAdmin. I had built the initial database on phpMyAdmin, as I was not familiar with the Laravel Migrations.
Now I am at a point where I better understand the power of Laravel Migrations, and would like to use them going forward to update the test database and move those changes to the production.
What is the course of action for me? Can I delete everything in the app/database/migrations dir and start from scratch? Will there be issues down the line calling php artisan migrate in my test and production environment?
Thanks in advance for the responses!
Short answer: no problems. If you just add/alter/remove tables/columns in the up() and down() methods.
Longer answer: still no problem. As long as you don't drop a table that is not created in an up() method.
But let's say you get to work with another developer, that person also wants to develop on a local DB. But you don't have the migration for it - so the new dev needs to run the initial structure from test DB, and then apply the new migrations.
In that case I would start with 1 big migration where you create all the initial tables, and in the down() the drops of those tables, so the new dev can just run the migrate and start coding.
edit: and after that migration for the initial structure, just add new ones while developing ;)
I have created the schema through MySQL Workbench and synchronized it with the database.
All the tables are there in database. Now when I use the
php artisan migrate
command, is there an option to take the fields director from the database instead of specifying the fields name.
Also could you please suggest any other tools on github.
Laravel Migrations Generator will help us generate migration source code from existed database in Laravel 4.
so if you already have your sql schema, created in mysql workbench, then you'd need to put that schema into laravel migrations using the schema builder.
there are tools that make this part easier:
http://www.laravelsd.com/ - kinda like mysql workbench, with an export possibility to laravel migration code
https://github.com/XCMer/larry-four-generator writes existing databases to laravel migration code
Another option is to use our tool Skipper (https://www.skipper18.com) We introduced Laravel support a month ago and now, in a beta phase, it is free for Laraver users.
Skipper allows you to import your MySQL Workbench project directly (or it is possible to import existing database too) and then export migrations and object files from Skipper to your Laravel project.
The benefit of this solution is that you can maintain your ORM schema directly in Skipper and continuously update model object files and create new migrations automatically from the application without the necessity to write any code manually.
If you want to try it, you can download it here https://www.skipper18.com/en/download, and in the initial application license screen select "Laravel Beta license".
I'm learning laravel and in most of tutorials they are making migrations using artisan.
I skip that step and I'm working directly on a database.
I don't know for what can a migration be useful.
so the question is: what is exactly a migration?
If you are the lone developer, you may not get much use out of it.
But imagine you have multiple developers each with your app stored locally on their machine. What happens when you need to make an update to the database? You would have to make the update, send the query to each other developer, and they would have to run the query on their machines. Once you get a decent amount of developers making changes to the database, this process can quickly become overwhelming and it's only a matter of time before people start missing the changes.
With migrations, all of the changes are stored as files, so in order for a developer to catch up, all they need to do is fetch the code changes and run php artisan migrate and all the work is done for them. This means all your developers are consistently working with the same database structure.