Check if migrations are up-to-date in CI

[CamiloDFM]

Hi everyone! 👋

We're starting to use Payload at my org, and I'm currently setting up CI/CD for our first site. I was wondering if anyone has replicated Django's makemigrations --check to use in CI.

For those unfamiliar with Django, makemigrations is Django's equivalent to payload migrate:create. The --check flag checks if there are any schema changes not reflected in the existing migration files, and if there are any, exits with an error code instead of creating the migration file.

Doing this manually with payload migrate:create doesn't seem to be trivial, given that the command asks for user input if there are no schema changes, and a solution would need to capture and check the command's output. So I wanted to see if anyone has already solved this before reinventing the wheel.

Thanks!

[kenneth-devedis]

@CamiloDFM did you implement this? I would be interested in an example implementation.

Also checking all the payload generate:* tasks have no changes in ci would be great.

[CamiloDFM]

Nope, we didn't. As the project went on, we stopped having migrations issues, so this issue's priority went down.

Given the solution @r1tsuu brought to light, I'd try to do something like this in a script:

• Run pnpm payload migrate:create --skip-empty
• If the command errors because the shell wasn't interactive (which is what I believe would happen in GHA - don't really have time to test this out now), exit with code 1, as that would mean that there were type changes but Payload wasn't able to resolve them automatically and started asking the user which column is new and which is renamed.
• Check the migrations folder. If there are no new files, exit with 0. Otherwise, exit 1.

Our project is paused now, but if no official support for this use case has been implemented and no one else has a better solution by then, I'll share whatever code we come up with.

[r1tsuu]

Just opened a PR #11592, you can use the --skip-empty flag. It will reject the prompt automatically if there were no any changes to the schema.

[CamiloDFM]

Nice, thank you! I'm still missing the full functionality for a CI check, but we can use this as a starting point.

[ejasarevic]

Hi @CamiloDFM This one just solves 3rd point from above (check migrations folder). Did you find a way how to solve 2nd one (if the shell is interactive or not)?

[busbyk]

In case it's helpful, this is what we're using in our CI to check if a migration should have been created for a PR or not:

      - name: Check if a migration is needed
        run: |
          output=$(pnpm payload migrate:create --skip-empty 2>&1)
          echo "$output"
          if echo "$output" | grep -q "Migration created at"; then
            echo "❌ A migration was created, which means the schema is out of sync"
            echo "Please run 'pnpm payload migrate:create' locally and commit the migration"
            exit 1
          else
            echo "✅ No migration needed - schema is up to date"
          fi