Migrations make us crazy!

Our Open Event team is not small, so problems with migrations occur very often. I’d like to describe how to solve these common problems and avoid Contributors frustration. Because more of us didn’t know how to solve this problems at the beginning so we wasted a lot of time to find a source of problem.

The most common mistake is that we forget run migration on Heroku. Developer is sometimes surprised because something works for him but he forgets to run migration on server. These small mistakes lead to huge problems and at that time our app throws a lots of bugs related to database. We can often see “Internal server error”.Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 22.55.25.png So if developer changes table he has to run migration!

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:/vagrant$ python manage.py db migrate

But above command Quite often doesn’t solve our problem, because We face other problems while updating DB for example

alembic.util.exc.CommandError: Multiple head revisions are present for given argument ‘head’; please specify a specific target revision, ‘<branchname>@head’ to narrow to a specific head, or ‘heads’ for all heads

this problem is caused by two developers which push code to Github with migrations without merging two heads to achieve one head.

So to solve this problem you only have to know ids of two heads

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:/vagrant$ python manage.py db heads

e38935822969 (head)
f55fde3d62b1 (head)

Then you have to merge it

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:/vagrant$ python manage.py db merge e38935822969 f55fde3d62b1

Generating /vagrant/migrations/versions/ecb671d1eb4b_.py … done

Upgrade DB

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:/vagrant$ python manage.py db upgrade

INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Context impl PostgresqlImpl.
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Will assume transactional DDL.
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Running upgrade 00ea66754d06 -> d84f976530e1, empty message
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Running upgrade d84f976530e1 -> 1b3e4f5f56bd, empty message
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Running upgrade 1b3e4f5f56bd -> e38935822969, empty message
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Running upgrade e38935822969, f55fde3d62b1 -> ecb671d1eb4b, empty message

And finally run migrations

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:/vagrant$ python manage.py db migrate
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Context impl PostgresqlImpl.
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Will assume transactional DDL.
INFO [alembic.ddl.postgresql] Detected sequence named ‘role_id_seq’ as owned by integer column ‘role(id)’, assuming SERIAL and omitting
INFO [alembic.ddl.postgresql] Detected sequence named ‘microlocation_id_seq’ as owned by integer column ‘microlocation(id)’, assuming SERIAL and omitting….

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.