Deploying database changes with Prisma Migrate

To apply pending migrations to staging, testing, or production environments, run the migrate deploy command as part of your CI/CD pipeline:

npx prisma migrate deploy

info

This guide does not apply for MongoDB.
Instead of migrate deploy, db push is used for MongoDB.

Exactly when to run prisma migrate deploy depends on your platform. For example, a simplified Heroku workflow includes:

Ensuring the ./prisma/migration folder is in source control
Running prisma migrate deploy during the release phase

Ideally, migrate deploy should be part of an automated CI/CD pipeline, and we do not generally recommend running this command locally to deploy changes to a production database (for example, by temporarily changing the DATABASE_URL environment variable). It is not generally considered good practice to store the production database URL locally.

Beware that in order to run the prisma migrate deploy command, you need access to the prisma dependency that is typically added to the devDependencies. Some platforms like Vercel, prune development dependencies during the build, thereby preventing you from calling the command. This can be worked around by making the prisma a production dependency, by moving it to dependencies in your package.json. For more information about the migrate deploy command, see:

Deploying database changes using GitHub Actions

As part of your CI/CD, you can run prisma migrate deploy as part of your pipeline to apply pending migrations to your production database.

Here is an example action that will run your migrations against your database:

deploy.yml

name: Deploy
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - prisma/migrations/**
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install
      - name: Apply all pending migrations to the database
        run: npx prisma migrate deploy
        env:
          DATABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.DATABASE_URL }}

The highlighted line shows that this action will only run if there is a change in the prisma/migrations directory, so npx prisma migrate deploy will only run when migrations are updated.

Ensure you have the DATABASE_URL variable set as a secret in your repository, without quotes around the connection string.

Deploying database changes using GitHub Actions​

Deploying database changes using GitHub Actions