Version: 4.4

Schema Generator

SchemaGenerator can do harm to your database. It will drop or alter tables, indexes, sequences and such. Please use this tool with caution in development and not on a production server. It is meant for helping you develop your Database Schema, but NOT with migrating schema from A to B in production. A safe approach would be generating the SQL on development server and saving it into SQL Migration files that are executed manually on the production server.

SchemaTool assumes your project uses the given database on its own. Update and Drop commands will mess with other tables if they are not related to the current project that is using MikroORM. Please be careful!

To generate schema from your entity metadata, you can use SchemaGenerator helper.

You can use it via CLI:

npx mikro-orm schema:create --dump   # Dumps create schema SQL
npx mikro-orm schema:update --dump   # Dumps update schema SQL
npx mikro-orm schema:drop --dump     # Dumps drop schema SQL

You can also use --run flag to fire all queries, but be careful as it might break your database. Be sure to always check the generated SQL first before executing. Do not use --run flag in production!

schema:create will automatically create the database if it does not exist.

schema:update drops all unknown tables by default, you can use --no-drop-tables to get around it. There is also --safe flag that will disable both table dropping as well as column dropping.

schema:drop will by default drop all database tables. You can use --drop-db flag to drop the whole database instead.

Using SchemaGenerator programmatically#

Or you can create simple script where you initialize MikroORM like this:

./create-schema.ts

import { MikroORM } from '@mikro-orm/core';

(async () => {
  const orm = await MikroORM.init({
    entities: [Author, Book, ...],
    dbName: 'your-db-name',
    // ...
  });
  const generator = orm.getSchemaGenerator();

  const dropDump = await generator.getDropSchemaSQL();
  console.log(dropDump);

  const createDump = await generator.getCreateSchemaSQL();
  console.log(createDump);

  const updateDump = await generator.getUpdateSchemaSQL();
  console.log(updateDump);

  // there is also `generate()` method that returns drop + create queries
  const dropAndCreateDump = await generator.generate();
  console.log(dropAndCreateDump);

  // or you can run those queries directly, but be sure to check them first!
  await generator.dropSchema();
  await generator.createSchema();
  await generator.updateSchema();

  await orm.close(true);
})();

Then run this script via ts-node (or compile it to plain JS and use node):

$ ts-node create-schema

Limitations of SQLite#

There are limitations of SQLite database because of which it behaves differently than other SQL drivers. Namely, it is not possible to:

create foreign key constraints when altering columns
create empty tables without columns
alter column requires nullability

Because of this, you can end up with different schema with SQLite, so it is not suggested to use SQLite for integration tests of your application.