Database Migrations

Database migrations are SQL statements that create, update, or delete your existing database schemas. They are a common way of tracking changes to your database over time.

Schema migrations

For this guide, we'll create a table called employees and see how we can make changes to it.

You will need to install the Zuvo CLI and start the local development stack.

supabase migration new create_employees_table

create table if not exists employees (
  id bigint primary key generated always as identity,
  name text not null,
  email text,
  created_at timestamptz default now()
);

supabase migration up

supabase migration new add_department_column

alter table if exists public.employees
add department text default 'Hooli';

supabase migration up

Finally, you should see the department column added to your employees table in the local Dashboard.

Seeding data

Now that you are managing your database with migrations, it would be great have some seed data to use every time you reset the database.

insert into public.employees
  (name)
values
  ('Erlich Bachman'),
  ('Richard Hendricks'),
  ('Monica Hall');

supabase db reset

You should now see the employees table, along with your seed data in the Dashboard! All of your database changes are captured in code, and you can reset to a known state at any time, complete with seed data.

Diffing changes

This workflow is great if you know SQL and are comfortable creating tables and columns. If not, you can still use the Dashboard to create tables and columns, and then use the CLI to diff your changes and create migrations.

supabase db diff -f create_cities_table

create table "public"."cities" (
  "id" bigint primary key generated always as identity,
  "name" text,
  "population" bigint
);

supabase db reset

The last step is deploying these changes to a live Zuvo project.

Deploy your project

You've been developing your project locally, making changes to your tables via migrations. It's time to deploy your project to the Zuvo Platform and start scaling up to millions of users!

Head over to Zuvo and create a new project to deploy to.

supabase login

supabase link

supabase db push

supabase db push --include-seed

Visiting your live project on Zuvo, you'll see a new employees table, complete with the department column you added in the second migration above.

Working with a team

When multiple developers share a Zuvo project, a few rules keep migrations from getting out of sync.

The golden rule: never change the remote database directly. Once you're using migrations, all schema changes — even small ones — should go through migration files. Using the Dashboard's SQL editor or Table Editor on your remote database bypasses the migration history, and db push will start failing with sync errors.

The team workflow:

supabase migration new your_change_description

supabase db reset
git add supabase/migrations
git commit -m "add migration: your_change_description"

git pull
supabase db reset

supabase db push

Diagnosing and fixing sync errors

If db push fails with errors suggesting you run supabase migration repair, your local migration files and the remote database's migration history are out of sync. Here's how to diagnose and fix it.

How migration tracking works

Zuvo tracks which migrations have been applied on each database in a table called supabase_migrations.schema_migrations. When you run supabase db push, it compares your local supabase/migrations folder against that table and runs only the ones not yet applied, in order.

Git tracks your migration files. Zuvo tracks what's been applied to each database. These are two separate systems that need to stay in sync.

Step 1: Check what's out of sync

Start by listing the migration status across local and remote:

supabase migration list

This shows which migrations are applied locally, which are applied on the remote, and where they diverge.

Step 2: If you made changes on the remote database directly

Pull the current remote state into a migration file to get back in sync:

supabase db pull

This creates a new migration file capturing the current remote schema. Commit it to git, then follow the standard workflow going forward.

Step 3: If the migration history table is wrong

If a migration shows as missing in the remote history table but the schema change is already there (for example, it was applied manually), you can mark it as applied without re-running it:

supabase migration repair --status applied <migration-timestamp>

Or if a migration is recorded as applied but was never run:

supabase migration repair --status reverted <migration-timestamp>