Laravel - Migration scripts used multple times across platforms - php

I just had a thought of serving fresh data for a demo app.
What I want to achieve is to have the schema and a set of data prepared beforehand and got ready to be migrated as the demo app is run. Simply put, every time a user runs the app, the database will be dumped with fresh data.
Is that possible? In Laravel 4, I know when I generate a migration script through the CLI, it seems like it has a timestamps attached to the file name, I was wondering if that would prevent the migration from being executed in later days in the future?
Thanks everyone.

What I want to achieve is to have the schema and a set of data prepared beforehand and got ready to be migrated as the demo app is run. Simply put, every time a user runs the app, the database will be dumped with fresh data.
Speaking of having a set of prepared data, I think Database Seeding is close to what you want.
The docs also mention how you could use the migration and seeding together. Although you'll need to decide how to do the migration + seed yourself. E.g. trigger by artisan command, trigger every page load, etc.
Rollback all migrations and run them all again (reference):
php artisan migrate:refresh
php artisan migrate:refresh --seed
You could also use packages like fzaninotto/Faker to help with generating a closer-to-real-life seed data for you.
In Laravel 4, I know when I generate a migration script through the CLI, it seems like it has a timestamps attached to the file name, I was wondering if that would prevent the migration from being executed in later days in the future?
The timestamp in the migration file name is only used for indicating the order in which the migration should be run. So you don't end up running migrations where you try to add a column before adding its table. As long as you do php artisan migrate:refresh and you have set up the up() and down() in your migration files correctly, it should not be a problem.
Although note that if you are in a team, be sure to check the migration order since two or more members can create migration files in parallel to each other.

Related

Laravel Multiple Migration Table in one Statement

I am new to Laravel and I'm confused if it is possible to create a multiple migration table in Laravel in just one run?
Like:
php artisan make:migration user_acc_tbl --create=user_acc_tbl, user_info_tbl --create=user_info_tbl, skills_tbl --create=skills_tbl
I hope it is possible. So that we can just run the command once from the command terminal to create multiple migration files. It would be really helpful though.
According to the Laravel documentation, it is not possible to make multiple migrations in one command line. You may be able to write a custom artisan console command and do it that way, however I really don't see how it would save that much time.
What you could do is create multiple tables from one migration file. Just use Schema::create and create the proper tables with the necessary columns.
You could also create aliases to help speed up workflow in the terminal.

Is there a way to clear model tables using Laravel artisan?

During development, for testing purpose, I sometimes need the tables related to one of the model clear. For example, I may have a team model with testers, coders, managers, projects and offices models linked with foreign key. I would like to clear all of these tables to test my create team function.
Currently I do that by,
php artisan migrate:refresh --seed
It works, seeder adds back data I needed for the testing environment, but it also clears all other unrelated tables. Also, it drops and recreate table and therefore it is slow.
I know I can write a function for that, but it seems a bit overkill. Is there other artisan command for me to do this action?
All you need is this artisan command:
php artisan db:seed --class=TeamSeeder
where TeamSeeder is the name of the seeder class which you have created to seed a specific table.
Make sure you truncate the table in that seeder class, before seeding.
This command will not recreate the table and which is not even required in your case.
Hope this will help.

Laravel 4 migrate:make not working; just stops after "Compiling views" step

I'm a total newbie following the guestbook tutorial at laravelbook.com, via Koding.com.
In my project directory, running php artisan migrate:make create_entries_table (also tried with --create=entries appended) produces the following response:
Generated migration: blah_blah_blah_create_entries_table
Compiling common classes
Compiling views
That's it. No migration table or file is created. Any idea as to why this is happening? I already asked on the L forum yesterday, nobody's responded :( Would really appreciate some insight on this...
UPDATE:
Very odd. I ran migrate:reset, and it said Nothing to rollback. But now two migration files are there, from yesterday (one with schema blueprint, one just with blank up & down functions)! No rows in migrations table though.
Other than the migration files not appearing, this is expected behaviour. The migrate:make command only creates the migration file in which you will specify what database actions Laravel is supposed to trigger when migrating (up) or rolling back (down). By default that file will contain a class (which is named by studly-casing the migration name) which up and down methods, nothing more. You might want to use Laravel's Schema class, as per usual, or you might want to do raw queries using the DB class, but you're actually free to put whatever code you want to automate in there (I sometimes run artisan commands in my migrations). Since no error is triggered, I'm assuming Laravel has permission to create files in your database/migrations folder, so it might just be that your app is not refreshing the files view afterwards?
Anyway, in order to actually run the migrations, which will create the migrations table in your database if there isn't one already, is just php artisan migrate. To rollback the last batch of migrations you can use php artisan migrate:rollback and to rollback all batches you use php artisan migrate:reset, but either command is useless if no migration table yet exists, which appeared to be your case.

Creating migrations in Laravel 4 for an existing DB

I'm about to start building an API for an existing app with the DB already in production. Functionality will slowly be ported to the API in the future and the app will become more "API-centric".
One of the main starting points is to adopt migrations and a build process. I have reservations on the best way to create migrations for an existing schema without breaking production when they are executed.
As we would like to move quickly with porting functionality over to the API, we ideally want to recreate our current schema as part of our build process and get some core unit tests in place - as opposed to just creating migrations for future changes.
This is where I become unsure as to the best place to start.
What is the best approach for a task like this?
Could the current schema be imported as our first migration?
Could this initial migration be wrapped in something like:
if ( App::environment() !== 'production' ) to ensure it isn't executed in a production environment?
Is it ok to exclude a migration for a particular environment or could this cause problems?
Is there maybe another approach or something stupidly simple I'm missing? :)
I created a tool not to long ago that will generate all the migrations for your current database schema. It also adds the newly created migrations to the migrations table, as the tables already exist. You can get it here: https://github.com/Xethron/migrations-generator
Secondly, I use the following line of code in my DatabaseSeeder, but you can add it to any function you wish to disable in production:
if (App::environment() === 'production') {
exit('Don\'t be stupid, this is a production server!!!');
}
It shouldn't be a problem if you stop execution by throwing an error or as I do above. If you don't, Laravel will believe the changes happened successfully and remove them from the migrations table, and cause errors when running your migrations. The only exception is if you exclude both the up and down code (But I can't see why you would want to do that)
Hope this helps.
I wouldn't suggest running migrations in production environment at all, but if you must then make a backup copy of the database first and also create a copy of the database locally and do the migration there then test to make sure it all works properly.
You could create your first migration and manually add all the schema layout to it. But I would actually do this in a few migrations to have each table as its own migration.
Since migrations are run from the CLI using artisan you can pass the environment and the database you want the migration to be run on:
artisan migrate --database="connectionName" --env="local"
There is no issue running migration on a particular environment besides what I stated above for production.
Remember to add all existing schema layouts from step 1 (the migration file name excluding the extension e.g. 2014_03_25_143340_AddCountriesTable) to the migrations table in the database, otherwise running the command in step 2 will throw errors about table already exist.
Hope this helps.

Generating migration from existing database in Yii or Laravel

I'm working on a project that has a fairly complex database (150+ tables). In order to be able to maintain changes, I've decided to add migrations, preferably using Yii or Laravel.
Does anybody know, if it is possible to generate a initial migration from an existing database?
Creating it by hand would:
take for ever and
be very error-prone.
If there is no way, does anybody know a good PHP-based framework, that supports such functionality?
Instructions for accomplishing this in Yii:
Add your database connection settings to protected/config/console.php.
Run yiic migrate create initial to create the stub code for the migration.
Copy contents of this gist to protected/commands/InitialDbMigrationCommand.php.
Run yiic initialdbmigration 'name_of_your_database' > initial_migration.php to generate up() and down() methods for initial database migration.
Copy and paste up() and down() methods from initial_migration.php to the file created in the protected/migrations folder in step 2.
'Doctrine Project' (aka Doctrine) has the ability to create DB migrations for existing DB structures, so you can recreate the existing structure. It can be easily implemented in Symfony, Laravel, also in Yii and many frameworks.
Sample from:
http://symfony.com/legacy/doc/doctrine/1_2/en/07-Migrations
From Database
If you have an existing database you can build a set of migration
classes that will re-create your database by running the following
command.
$ ./symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-db
From Models
If you have an existing set of models you can build a set of migration
classes that will create your database by running the following
command.
$ ./symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-models
Here is a Laravel package I created that does exactly that. It automatically generates clean and accurate Laravel migrations from your existing database.
As it doesn't make any assumptions of the database, it should work on any database structure while even keeping the original index and foreign key names.
https://github.com/Xethron/migrations-generator
Well since migration is about setting up your database structure and make changes to it, not to reflect a current database there is no such way.
And this is also not a step you have to make. You can start from where you are at the moment, which will make you able to rollback up to this point. Which means you can make migrations for your current tables without having to specify their entire structure, but just the changes only.
Let's say you have a table called user and want to add their firstname to it.
php artisan migrate:make add_firstname_to_user
Now go into application/migrations and find the migration file, add this
public function up()
{
Schema::table('user', function($table)
{
$table->string('firstname');
});
}
public function down() {
Schema::table('user', function($table)
{
$table->drop_column('firstname');
});
}
Now you can add migrate it
php artisan migrate:install // if you haven't run this, should only be once
php artisan migrate
.. and rollback using
php artisan migrate:rollback
This will add or drop the column firstname, without affecting your table in any other way.
As for Yii 1.x, schmunk has created a wonderful database-command yiic command.
This command covers only up migrations. You must write your own down migrations.
To use it:
Get the newest version from GitHub and put it's contents into /protected/commands folder (create one, if it does not exist). Note, that you need to put contents as is (without subfolder for this particular command), which is contrary to what we do for example for extensions.
Rename EDatabaseCommand.php file (and class inside) to DatabaseCommand.php, if you want to use yiic database command (as suggested in docs). Without this fix, you'll have to use yiic edatabase command, as there's slight inconsistency between docs and the code (at least in the newest version, as of writing this; maybe schmunk is going to fix this).
Having this, navigate back to protected folder in your console and execute yiic database dump migration_name --prefix=table_name.
This will create a migration protected/runtime/migration_name.php file with proper date and time in the beginning of file name, filled with series of CDbMigration commands to recreate your database schema. Visit "Usage" section in the docs to read more about customizing command.
I think that the answer is: https://github.com/jamband/yii2-schemadump for Yii2
"This command to generate the schema from an existing database."
I use both Yii and Laravel and I could not find what you require for either of them. They both create empty files and you need to create the migration script yourself.
For a table of 150 tables it will be challenge to create the migrations yourself, but it is not quite as hard as you imagine. Because you already have the information on the fields it should not take so long to create.
After doing some research, here's what you're going to need for Laravel: https://github.com/XCMer/larry-four-generator
(version 4 at least, who knows how long this will work, Laravel changes too fast and has too many breaking changes)
You'll want to run php artisan larry:fromdb and it'll show you the tables...You can also exclude or only process certain tables (look at the readme).
Again, super super useful if you like to build your schema in something like MySQL Workbench. I also saw mention of a package that would parse the workbench files...But the link was dead.
You may also wish to use this larry package with: https://github.com/JeffreyWay/Laravel-4-Generators
You can then create scaffolding a la CakePHP style.
Alternatively, try this package: https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-migration-generator
There is one now for Yii:
This allows a distributed team to easily update the db locally and then distribute it's updates with thee other developers automatically with the rest of the code via a versioning control system (I used git). It also performs a full initial db dump to xml and to a migration file.
project home:
https://code.google.com/p/yii-automatically-generated-migration-files/
source code:
https://code.google.com/p/yii-automatically-generated-migration-files/source/checkout
I've created it from scratch as I was annoyed with the fact that I had to do this manually in order to distribute it to my team.
Hope it helps!
Feel free to share bugs, improvements and comments.

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