@ReWild 👋

This is a great question. We’re working to make operations like database migrations much easier to do on the App Platform, and plan to rollout support for pre-deploy and post-deploy jobs very soon for exactly this use-case.

In the meantime, you have a couple options:

• Include the migration command in your custom run command. This can be unsafe in the case where you’re scaled up to multiple instances, and if your migration process isn’t locking on the DB to ensure only 1 is running.
• Manually execute the migration using Console access in the UI. This has the downside of not running automatically with every deploy.

We’ll follow-up on this question when we ship pre/post deploy jobs, very soon, so stay tuned.

We recently introduced the jobs component type that can be used for this, where you can specify the type such that the job will run pre-deploy or post-deploy.

This feature is currently only available via API/CLI (doctl), but not yet the UI.

We have an example of this here: https://github.com/digitalocean/sample-golang-notes/blob/migrate-job/.do/app.yaml

name: sample-golang-notes
services:
- name: web
  github:
    repo: digitalocean/sample-golang-notes
    branch: migrate-job
  envs:
  - key: DATABASE_URL
    value: ${db.DATABASE_URL}

jobs:
- name: migrate
  kind: PRE_DEPLOY
  github:
    repo: digitalocean/sample-golang-notes
    branch: migrate-job
  build_command: mkdir -p bin && cd cmd/migrate && go build -o ../../bin/migrate
  run_command: bin/migrate
  envs:
  - key: DATABASE_URL
    value: ${db.DATABASE_URL}

databases:
- name: db
  engine: PG
  version: "12"

You can submit this using doctl (make sure you’re using the latest version):

doctl apps create --spec .do/app.yaml

We have another job type that will be landing in production soon as well — executed on failed deploys — so stay tuned for that.