Deploy migrations from a local environment

There are two scenarios where you might consider deploying migrations directly from a local environment to a production environment.

• You have a local CI/CD pipeline
• You are baselining a production environment

This page outlines some examples of how you can do that and why we would generally not recommend it.

Local CI/CD pipeline

If you do not have an automated CI/CD process, you can technically deploy new migrations from your local environment to production in the following ways:

1. Make sure your migration history is up to date. You can do this through running prisma migrate dev, which will generate a migration history from the latest changes made.
2. Swap your local connection URL for your production connection URL

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://johndoe:randompassword@localhost:5432/my_local_database"

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://johndoe:randompassword@prod-db.example.com:5432/my_production_database"

3. Run prisma migrate deploy

⛔ We strongly discourage this solution due to the following reasons

• You risk exposing your production database connection URL to version control.
• You may accidentally use your production connection URL instead and in turn override or delete your production database.

✅ We recommend setting up an automated CI/CD pipeline

The pipeline should handle deployment to staging and production environments, and use migrate deploy in a pipeline step. See the deployment guides for examples.

Baselining a production database

When you add Prisma Migrate to an existing database, you must baseline the production database. Baselining is performed once, and can be done from a local instance.