intermediate

Migrations

Generate, edit, and apply migrations with review of SQL, ordering, reversibility, and production rollout risks.

TypeORM migrations record database changes as TypeScript classes with `up` and `down` methods. Generated migrations need review—entity metadata diffs can produce destructive SQL.

On interviews: generation versus hand editing, environment configuration, `synchronize: true` dangers in production, rollout planning.

Common pitfalls: schema sync in production; down migrations not restoring lost data; missing data transformation steps on renames.

The trade-off is codegen from entities versus explicit SQL ownership.

Checklist:

  • Disable production synchronize.
  • Review up and down SQL.
  • Plan data migration separately.
  • Version migrations like application code.