Deploying database changes with Prisma Migrate
To apply pending migrations to staging, testing, or production environments, run the migrate deploy
command as part of your CI/CD pipeline:
$npx prisma migrate deploy
This guide does not apply for MongoDB.
Instead of migrate deploy
, db push
is used for MongoDB.
Exactly when to run prisma migrate deploy
depends on your platform. For example, a simplified Heroku workflow includes:
- Ensuring the
./prisma/migration
folder is in source control - Running
prisma migrate deploy
during the release phase
Ideally, migrate deploy
should be part of an automated CI/CD pipeline, and we do not generally recommend running this command locally to deploy changes to a production database (for example, by temporarily changing the DATABASE_URL
environment variable). It is not generally considered good practice to store the production database URL locally.
Beware that in order to run the prisma migrate deploy
command, you need access to the prisma
dependency that is typically added to the devDependencies
. Some platforms like Vercel, prune development dependencies during the build, thereby preventing you from calling the command. This can be worked around by making the prisma
a production dependency, by moving it to dependencies
in your package.json
.
For more information about the migrate deploy
command, see: