Quickstart

Welcome to the Septentrion quickstart documentation.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to write migrations in the expected format, how to visualize them and how to run them against a PostgreSQL database.

Prepare your database

If you already have a PostgreSQL database around, make sure to note the connection parameters. Otherwise, we’ll create one together with Docker:

$ docker run --detach --rm -p 5432:5432 --name septentrion_db postgres

Note

If you need to stop the docker at some point, use docker stop septentrion_db.

Note

If you stop the Docker or reboot your machine, the Postgres database will be trashed and you will need to re-create one and add some data again.

You’ll also need psycopg2, which is notoriously complex to install. Septentrion will install the psycopg2 python package, but will expect the system to already have the prerequisites (on Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt install libpq-dev python-dev postgresql-client

Note

On a different OS, if you experiment difficulties, we’ll be grateful if you can tell us via an issue so that we improve this documentation.

Install and configure Septentrion

Within a virtualenv, install Septentrion with:

(venv) $ pip install septentrion[psycopg2_binary]

Next we will configure the connection to the PostgreSQL database. We can do this either with command line flags, environment variables or a configuration file. In this tutorial, we will use a configuration file, septentrion.ini.

[septentrion]
migrations_root=migrations
host=localhost
username=postgres
# port=5432

Note

With the Docker setup described above, you should be good to go. If you need additional configuration parameters to connect to your database, have a look at advanced configuration options.

Write migrations

Migrations are SQL files that are executed in order. Migrations are grouped together in successive versions. All migrations in the same version are placed in a folder named after the version number.

Let’s create our migration folder, and a first version folder.

$ mkdir migrations
$ mkdir migrations/1.0

Now we can add a migration file in migrations/1.0/ named 00-author.ddl.sql:

BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "author" (
    "id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "name" varchar(100) NOT NULL,
    "birth_date" varchar(10) NOT NULL
);
COMMIT;

Note

Migrations are executed in alphabetical order, so an easy way to control the order is to prefix filenames with two digits.

Note

ddl stands for Data Definition Language and corresponds to all the operations that change the structure of the database (CREATE, DROP, …).

Congratulations, you have now written your first Septentrion migration. Let’s see how to run it!

Run migrations

First, we want to visualize what is going to happen, without making any change to our data yet.

$ septentrion show-migrations

Current version is None
Target version is 1.0
Version 1.0
  [ ] 00-author.ddl.sql

Great, we can now run it for real:

$ septentrion migrate

Applying migrations
Version 1.0

Note

You should run septentrion in your root directory, where your migrations folder is.

If something is not working as it should be, you probably want to check the troubleshooting guide or the advanced options.

At this point, the author table has been created in the database. We can check that and simulate our application by creating a few rows in the table.

$ psql --host localhost --user postgres postgres

postgres=# \d

                      List of relations
 Schema |             Name              |   Type   |  Owner
--------+-------------------------------+----------+----------
 public | author                        | table    | postgres
 public | author_id_seq                 | sequence | postgres
 public | septentrion_migrations        | table    | postgres
 public | septentrion_migrations_id_seq | sequence | postgres
 public | sql_version                   | table    | postgres
(5 rows)

postgres=# INSERT INTO author (name, birth_date)
VALUES
('Victor Hugo', '1802-02-26'),
('George Gordon Byron', '1788-01-22'),
('JRR Tolkien', '1892-01-03');
INSERT 0 3

postgres=# SELECT * FROM author;
 id |        name         | birth_date
----+---------------------+---------------
  0 | Victor Hugo         | 1802-02-26
  1 | George Gordon Byron | 1788-01-22
  2 | JRR Tolkien         | 1892-01-03
(3 rows)

A more complex migration

For version 2.0 of our application, we want to change birth_date from varchar to the date type.

We create a new folder for the version.

$ mkdir migrations/2.0

We can add the migration file in migrations/2.0/ named 00-change_birth_date_type.ddl.sql:

BEGIN;
ALTER TABLE author
    ALTER COLUMN birth_date
    TYPE DATE USING to_date(birth_date, 'YYYY-MM-DD');
COMMIT;

We launch the migration.

$ septentrion migrate

Applying migrations
Version 1.0
  [X] Already applied
Version 2.0
  [X] Applied 00-change_birth_date_type.ddl.sql

Now we can check that our migration successfully changed the column type in the author table.

$ psql --host localhost --user postgres postgres
postgres=# SELECT column_name, data_type FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name = 'author';
  column_name  |     data_type
---------------+-------------------
 id            | integer
 name          | character varying
 date_of_birth | date
(3 rows)

Congratulations, you can now run migrations with Septentrion!

Going further

To continue with practical steps, head to the How-to… section.

If you want to better understand some design decisions, head to the Discussions sections.