Grind’s Database is built on Knex.js, so for full documentation on schema building check out the Knex documentation.

This document assumes you have a basic understanding of how migrations & seeds work in Knex and focuses on their integration into Grind.

Grind’s Database integrates Knex tightly into Grind, so all CLI management of your database will be through Grind’s CLI and not through the knex command. This allows us to leverage all existing Grind config and models, without having to worry about building a separate Knexfile.

Grind offers three different CLI commands for managing migrations:

The migrate:latest command will run all outstanding migrations on your database. If you run this against a new database, it will first setup the database and then run the migrations.

bin/cli migrate:latest

The migrate:rollback command will revert the last batch of migrations by going through each migration in reverse order and calling the down function.

bin/cli migrate:rollback

The migrate:current-version command will output the current version of your migrations.

bin/cli migrate:current-version

Like migrations, you seed the database through bin/cli and not through the knex command.

To seed the database, there’s a single db:seed command.

bin/cli db:seed

Running db:seed will run through and execute each seed file.

Use Caution! Unlike migrations, seeds do not have a concept of state. Every time you run db:seed, it runs all seeds again, not just new seeds you’ve added. This means that existing data will likely be cleared out by your seeds each time they’re ran.

You can generate a migration via bin/cli make:migration. There are a few different options for you to invoke make:migration with:

  • bin/cli make:migration create_users_table will create /database/migrations/###-create_users_table.js as a basic migration
  • bin/cli make:migration --create=users will also create /database/migrations/###-create_users_table.js, however it generates boilerplate code to create the users table.
  • bin/cli make:migration --alter=users will create /database/migrations/###-alter_users_table.js, and it will generate boilerplate code to alter the users table.
  • bin/cli make:migration --alter=users alter_users_add_disabled will create /database/migrations/###-alter_users_add_disabled.js, and it will generate boilerplate code to alter the users table.

You can generate a seed file via bin/cli make:seed. You can invoke make:seed with a couple of different arguments:

  • bin/cli make:seed users will create database/seeds/##-users.js, but will not infer a table name.
  • bin/cli make:seed --table=users will also create database/seeds/##-users.js, but it will also set the table name for you.
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