Migrations Rollback

[rafaell-lycan]

Hi #drizzle-team & community folks 👋

I'd like to suggest something that I believe more people might be looking for. Is there any plan for rollback migrations?

My day-to-day workflow

Because Drizzle currently doesn't support a way to rollback migrations I'm using a custom solution (hopefully temporary) with migrate with a specific Dockerfile configured and a more painful way to configure/deploy to run our migrations, which might be slightly painful sometimes:

• Create a new migration using Drizzle;
• Include the suffix *.up.sql the migration script;
• Create a new file with the same name and change the suffix to *.down.sql and manually add a rollback;
• Run migrations on a custom Dockerfile + run.sh script that doesn't look as pretty as I would like; 😅

I was wondering if on next releases, there will be any sort migration rollback like migrate does.

1481574547_create_users_table.up.sql
1481574547_create_users_table.down.sql

This would benefit many developers and wouldn't be a breaking change by keeping everything else working.

Possible solution:

• Implement up/down SQL scripts on a new major release with the same drizzle-kit generate command;
• When running migrations it would use the same command and ignoring scripts with suffix *.down.sql;
• When running a undo/rollback with drizzle-kit it cheks for the migrations table and identifying the latest migration ID to match with a <migration_name>.down.sql script on the folder to be executed otherwise exit;
• This would open a possibility for Drizzle Kit adopt include the new drizzle-kit rollback:*/drizzle-kit undo:* command;

The future

Using Drizzle is being a breazy so far (coming from Knex) and I wanna see what things going far beyond the rest of the community.

Let's see how the community will (or not) react to this idea (calling for help) and also the core team.

[devanfarrell]

I would love a migrate down option as well. My current approach is:

• create a sql dump of our staging database
• delete my local database
• recreate the local database
• load the dump into the new local database
• rinse and repeat until the migration is correct

[capaj]

you're using mysql, right? No-transaction migrations are definitely a pain.

[devanfarrell]

Postgres personally but it's probably the same.

[capaj]

oh I thought you're repeating your migrations because they fail and your DB is in inconsistent state, but you're probably just iterating on your migration SQL script so youre migrations actually run OK from SQL standpoint.
On postgres if they fail on something like a missing foreign key whole thing reverts back, so you wouldn't need to manually fix anything.

[akhanalcs]

Coming from .NET background where we have amazing ORM like Entity Framework, I'm horrified to learn that JS ecosystem is awful in this regard.

[pppdns]

Coming from .NET background where we have amazing ORM like Entity Framework, I'm horrified to learn that JS ecosystem is awful in this regard.

It really is. Entity Framework sets the bar very high, though. I tried all the major ORM-s and DB tools in the JS ecosystem and there's no solution which checks all the boxes. Drizzle may become the one in a couple years

[ivawzh]

If implementing an automated rollback script will take a big effort, I'd like to have a way to opt in for a manual rollback script for the time waiting for the feature.

Being able to review and commit a rollback script like 1481574547_create_users_table.down.sql in a PR before we merge and deploy the migrations, that will give us much more confidence on dealing with production incidents with an option of rolling back.

[afogel]

I can't echo this request enough as an important aspect to mitigate unforeseen deployment issues.

I recognize that the drizzle team (as per @AndriiSherman 's comments in the discord) suggest that we leverage the push API for development.

However, sometimes a mismatch between what the data layer supports and the application layer requests after a migration runs successfully and is deployed (and this mismatch isn't caught in QA). Having a down migration would be incredibly helpful in that circumstance.

The drizzle toolkit is an awesome and incredibly sharp tool, but it would be nice if we had some method to sheath those tools at times.

Thank you!

[kkoyot]

I second that - not implementing migrations rollback/resetting is a huge omission. It's an awful pain to correct your migrations when developing schema change in a single PR doing changes on the way, since you have to delete or merge the migration files, modify the journal, revert the DB state manually and whatnot.

[rizen]

Can I pay Drizzle Team to add this?

[Ehtisham-Ayaan]

That was the same thought as i had. As rails has already this from years.

[darrenbarklie]

Also commenting to request this feature. Don't make me go back to TypeORM, please...

[nvegater]

Please add a rollback option for migrations :) would be awesome.

[lucasltv]

Don't have it yet? Wow... it's so essential!

[toshmukhamedov]

agree

[MChangFoundry]

Yeah this would be huge

[JasBogans]

[dragonfleas]

Your software doesn't have the rollback migrations feature being discussed here, why even mention it?

[FR073N]

Needing this feature so badly

[suzubki]

Hope it releases soon

[Leo-Henrique]

Just need this feature to use in production :(

[StuartMorris0]

Can we get any update on this from the drizzle team? I've posted the same in Discord, but haven't received a response. Be good to know if this is being worked on or not.

Not, is fine, we'd just need to work on some approach that builds the reverse migrations using something else, but I'd be keen to know if it's something in the pipeline just to avoid recreating the wheel here. Please and thanks 🙏

[afogel]

I made a feature request #2352 just in case

[kirkas]

+1 on this, this is the only thing preventing us from using Drizzle for production as migration rollback can be crucial when deploying.

[Twiddlle]

rollback pleaseeeee...

[nobledossy]

This. So much this. Drizzle-kit is still horridly flaky for me and seems to botch local migrations more than they work successfully. The most recent somehow only picked up some of the new tables and not others even though they're all imported properly in the schema.ts file! Dealing with botched Drizzle migrations is a huge pain in the butt due to the lack of any kind of rollback mechanism. I would HAPPILY take a Sequelize-style manual migration system over this any day of the week.

Drizzle is great, but drizzle-kit is still buggy and lacking in vital features.

[pppdns]

if you would take a manual migration tool over Drizzle, I believe you're better off with Kysely. It has a type safe migration builder with up and down support. The main difference between Drizzle and Kysely in this regard is that Drizzle auto-generates the migrations based on the schema changes which you store in a file

[SSTPIERRE2]

This should be a core feature of every single ORM. It is very common to write a migration and want to change something about it before actually committing/submitting the branch. I had to fix merge conflicts due to another developer creating and merging a migration before I submitted my branch, and it broke the migrations leading his to not run (since mine with the same number id already ran). Now I'm stuck manually querying the migration tracking table, but it is unclear which migration(s) I need to delete for the new one to run since they're stored with a hash, there's no way to identify which row corresponds to which migration file. I'm probably going to have to recreate my whole db just for this.

[ginkcode]

Agree.
Keeping only the hash in migrations table is a very bad idea.
Why we don't have the file name inside it?

[pppdns]

+1
This is how Laravel does it. Same for Adonis.js.
It stores the migration file name and the batch number (migrations running together can be rolled back together).
It works very well. You can simply do this infinitely while developing, testing, and changing migrations:

php artisan migrate
php artisan migrate:rollback

This will apply the missing migration(s) and then roll them back together. Between the 2 commands you can do your post-migration testing.
If you need to change something, just roll back the migration, change the code, and run it again.

[ptguebchandra]

it's 2025 and i hope there's an update for drizzle rollback feature, hope drizzle team will add it as soon as possible

[joelparkerhenderson]

Can one of the Drizzle team members please suggest a way forward with this overall issue?

Meaning, the capability to do migration up & down, along with migration files that have file names with date prefixes as similar to other web frameworks e.g. Laravel, Rails, Phoenix, Loco, Adonis, etc.

If it's a matter of money, can one of the Drizzle team members suggest a price, so all of us developers who want the feature can fund it?

If it's a matter of developer time, can one of the Drizzle team members estimate a ballpark time range such as how many hours the work may take, and estimate a ballpark release date range such as what month, so we might understand when it might happen?

This is because the lack of migration-down capabilities is a blocker for me using Drizzle for my next major project, so I'm hoping for any kind of solution or way to fund the work or timeline estimate.

Thanks so much!

[hi-reeve]

@AlexBlokh what's the progress about this feature?

[nnti3n]

I really love drizzle but please any update on this?

[PaulGrimshaw]

Nudge from me too please - seems writing equivalent down commands on every migrate should be simple enough.

[LiquidITGuy]

👍 for the need
🚩

[rpl-matt-demler]

+1 for us too. It's a non-starter without rollbacks.
Any approximate date (even just to the fiscal quarter) this feature will be ready? We have a large project beginning in a few weeks and if it's unlikely to be Q1, then I need to adopt something else

[theogravity]

+1 for us too. It's a non-starter without rollbacks. Any approximate date (even just to the fiscal quarter) this feature will be ready? We have a large project beginning in a few weeks and if it's unlikely to be Q1, then I need to adopt something else

Just adopt Kysely. It's what Drizzle ORM wishes it could be.

[rpl-matt-demler]

+1 for us too. It's a non-starter without rollbacks. Any approximate date (even just to the fiscal quarter) this feature will be ready? We have a large project beginning in a few weeks and if it's unlikely to be Q1, then I need to adopt something else

Just adopt Kysely. It's what Drizzle ORM wishes it could be.

That is the other option 👍 I would have liked to use Drizzle but if the community isn't getting updates on a pretty important feature (imo) then my hand is forced

[afogel]

it's on the roadmap as a key feature for v1.0 -- I know they're working on it, and as maintainers, they probably have many community demands in addition to trying to ship big new features. Just worth mentioning, even though it's a key feature and one that I think everyone desires

[rpl-matt-demler]

it's on the roadmap as a key feature for v1.0 -- I know they're working on it, and as maintainers, they probably have many community demands in addition to trying to ship big new features. Just worth mentioning, even though it's a key feature and one that I think everyone desires

Oh 100%. I'm sure they are under the pump! I get it! :) I just don't have discord access at work to join their discord server to try and poke around and find out about the status of a feature... especially this one which looks like a fairly big deal for some of the community. Was just hoping that a general update could be shared in respect to this feature so I could make a call on a project for us. If it's not ready, then it's not ready :) I'm sure I will have the chance to use Drizzle in the future if that's the case

[alif-devcon]

+1.

[alif-devcon]

Any updates @AlexBlokh?

[JosepAlacid]

Any good news about this one?

[predragnikolic]

Hey folks! Since 62+ people are getting notified every time someone says that they'd love to have this feature
Can we please stop spamming inboxes with messages with "+1" or "any updates"? (Also there is a subscribe button if you want to get notified)
Thanks!

[bezxc]

Any updates guys? 👉👈

[matthewblewitt]

Absolutely love drizzle, but my team won't adopt it prod without this feature 🙏

[rpl-matt-demler]

@matthewblewitt yea I've unsubscribed and no longer trying to get updates on this feature. I know it pisses some people off because they are subscribed to the topic... but they can equally just unsubscribe if they don't want the notifications 😄
Kysely was mentioned by another commenter. We've gone with that and it's amazing so far. It's not an ORM per se, more an abstraction layer over SQL, but has all the expected features of up & down migrations. Not the forum to sell it... but has those features that are critical to a lot of teams 👍

[szamanr]

we're subscribed because we want to know when this is implemented or there is a status update. not to get notified every week about another user requesting this. you can use reactions for that.

[rpl-matt-demler]

It's a fair comment. I guess the "+1" and the other comments are really just a more visible signal from the community that this is needed? Adding reactions doesn't seem to have the same impact ☺️

[nnti3n]

I'll pay for this feature

[capaj]

how much?
Also how would you like to implement it?
Fork drizzle-kit?
Or have some alternative CLI tool which just calls drizzle-kit and adds rollback?
If you would be ok having this in a standalone CLI I can take a look.