Prisma Migrate in development and production

Create and apply migrations

This command:

1. 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)
2. Applies pending migrations to the shadow database (for example, new migrations created by colleagues)
3. Generates a new migration from any changes you made to the Prisma schema before running migrate dev
4. Applies all unapplied migrations to the development database and updates the _prisma_migrations table
5. 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:

$npx prisma migrate reset

This command:

1. Drops the database/schema¹ if possible, or performs a soft reset if the environment does not allow deleting databases/schemas¹
2. Creates a new database/schema¹ with the same name if the database/schema¹ was dropped
3. Applies all migrations
4. Runs seed scripts

¹ For MySQL and MongoDB this refers to the database, for PostgreSQL and SQL Server to the schema, and for SQLite to the database file.

Note: 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 partial index or a stored procedure.

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

$npx prisma migrate dev --create-only

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

Refer to Customizing migrations for examples.

Team development

See: Team development with Prisma Migrate .

Advisory locking

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

• prisma migrate deploy
• 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.