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

Exactly when to run prisma migrate deploy depends on your platform. For example, a simplified Heroku workflow includes:

1. Ensuring the ./prisma/migration folder is in source control
2. 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:

• migrate deploy reference
• How migrate deploy works
• Production troubleshooting

Deploying database changes using GitHub Actions

As part of your CI/CD, you can run prisma migrate deploy as part of your pipeline to apply pending migrations to your production database.

Here is an example action that will run your migrations against your database:

deploy.yml
1name: Deploy
2on:
3  push:
4    branches:
5      - main
6
7jobs:
8  deploy:
9    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
10    steps:
11      - name: Checkout repo
12        uses: actions/checkout@v3
13      - name: Setup Node
14        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
15      - name: Install dependencies
16        run: npm install
17       run: npm run build
18       name: Apply all pending migrations to the database
19        run: npx prisma migrate deploy
20        env:
21          DATABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.DATABASE_URL }}

Ensure you have the DATABASE_URL variable set as a secret in your repository, without quotes around the connection string.