Schema management and migrations¶

Generating and using Schema files¶

A generated schema file allows you to easily transport a database agnostic schema. You can generate a schema file of your database using:

$ cake schema generate

This will generate a schema.php file in your app/config/schema directory.

The schema shell will only process tables for which there are models defined. To force the schema shell to process all the tables, you must add the -f option in the command line.

To later rebuild the database schema from your previously made schema.php file run:

$ cake schema create

This will drop and create the tables based on the contents of the schema.php.

Schema files can also be used to generate sql dump files. To generate a sql file containing the CREATE TABLE statements, run:

$ cake schema dump -write filename.sql

Where filename.sql is the desired filename for the sql dump. If you omit filename.sql the sql dump will be output to the console but not written to a file.

Migrations with CakePHP schema shell¶

Migrations allow for versioning of your database schema, so that as you develop features you have an easy and database agnostic way to distribute database changes. Migrations are achieved through either SCM controlled schema files or schema snapshots. Versioning a schema file with the schema shell is quite easy. If you already have a schema file created running

$ cake schema generate

Will bring up the following choices:

Generating Schema...
Schema file exists.
 [O]verwrite
 [S]napshot
 [Q]uit
Would you like to do? (o/s/q)

Choosing [s] (snapshot) will create an incremented schema.php. So if you have schema.php, it will create schema_2.php and so on. You can then restore to any of these schema files at any time by running:

$ cake schema update -s 2

Where 2 is the snapshot number you wish to run. The schema shell will prompt you to confirm you wish to perform the ALTER statements that represent the difference between the existing database the currently executing schema file.

You can perform a dry run by adding a -dry to your command.