Workflows

How to use Prisma Migrate commands in development and production environments

In a development environment, use the migrate dev command to generate and apply migrations:

Create and apply migrations

This command:

• Reruns the existing migration history in the shadow database in order to detect schema drift (edited or deleted migration file, or a manual changes to the database schema)
• Applies pending migrations to the shadow database (for example, new migrations created by colleagues)
• If it detects changes to the Prisma schema, it generates a new migration from these changes
• Applies all unapplied migrations to the development database and updates the _prisma_migrations table
• Triggers the generation of artifacts (for example, Prisma Client)

The migrate dev command will prompt you to reset the database in the following scenarios:

• Migration history conflicts caused by modified or missing migrations
• The database schema has drifted away from the end-state of the migration history

Reset the development database

You can also reset the database yourself to undo manual changes or db push experiments by running:

This command:

• Drops the database/schema¹ if possible, or performs a soft reset if the environment does not allow deleting databases/schemas*
• Creates a new database/schema¹ with the same name if the database/schema¹ was dropped
• Applies all migrations
• Runs seed scripts

For a simple and integrated way to re-create data in your development database as often as needed, check out our seeding guide.

Customizing migrations

Sometimes, you need to modify a migration before applying it. For example:

• You want to introduce a significant refactor, such as changing blog post tags from a String[] to a Tag[]
• You want to rename a field (by default, Prisma Migrate will drop the existing field)
• You want to change the direction of a 1-1 relationship
• You want to add features that cannot be represented in Prisma Schema Language - such as a stored procedure or a trigger.

The --create-only command allows you to create a migration without applying it:

To apply the edited migration, run prisma migrate dev again.

Refer to Customizing migrations for examples.

Team development

See: Team development with Prisma Migrate .

In production and testing environments, use the migrate deploy command to apply migrations:

migrate deploy should generally be part of an automated CI/CD pipeline, and we do not recommend running this command locally to deploy changes to a production database.

This command:

• Compares applied migrations against the migration history and warns if any migrations have been modified:

  WARNING The following migrations have been modified since they were applied:
  20210313140442_favorite_colors
  

• Applies pending migrations

The migrate deploy command:

• Does not issue a warning if an already applied migration is missing from migration history
• Does not detect drift (production database schema differs from migration history end state - for example, due to a hotfix)
• Does not reset the database or generate artifacts (such as Prisma Client)
• Does not rely on a shadow database

See also:

• Prisma Migrate in deployment
• Production troubleshooting

Advisory locking

Prisma Migrate makes use of advisory locking when you run production commands such as:

• prisma migrate deploy
• prisma migrate dev
• prisma migrate resolve

This safeguard ensures that multiple commands cannot run at the same time - for example, if you merge two pull requests in quick succession.

Advisory locking has a 10 second timeout (not configurable), and uses the default advisory locking mechanism available in the underlying provider:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL server

Prisma Migrate's implementation of advisory locking is purely to avoid catastrophic errors - if your command times out, you will need to run it again.

Since 5.3.0, the advisory locking can be disabled using the PRISMA_SCHEMA_DISABLE_ADVISORY_LOCK environment variable