How to detect schema drift in CI and ensure the migration directory is up to date with the desired schema state - ORM, HCL, SQL, or any other schema definition?

A .env file is a simple text file used to store environment variables for applications. It helps developers manage configuration settings, such as database credentials, API keys, and other sensitive information, without hardcoding them into the source code. By using a .env file, developers can keep their codebase clean, secure, and easily configurable across different environments.

For developers who want to use .env files with Atlas, there are two ways users can do so through the standard Atlas HCL configuration file:

PostGIS is a spatial database extension for PostgreSQL. It adds support for geometric objects, enabling the processing of spatial data like points, lines, and polygons. After installing PostGIS, the GEOMETRY data type can be used to define tables that capture geo-spatial data, for example:

How can I install Atlas, and why is go install no longer supported?

Developers who use Atlas to run migrations using a golang-migrate directory format, may run into an errors like:

-- migrating version 20250324061649.down.sql
-> DROP TABLE `users`;
   Error 1051 (42S02): Unknown table 'public.users'

With features such as composite schemas, custom rules, schema linting, and more, the atlas.hcl file can get complex. To validate or debug the file, you can use print statements as you commonly would with other languages.

PostgreSQL extensions are additional modules that extend the functionality of the PostgreSQL database. Examples of popular extensions include PostGIS for geographic data handling, PGVector for vector similarity search, and pgcrypto for cryptographic functions.

Once installed, these extensions provide additional data types and objects that users' schemas can leverage. However, because extensions are managed at the database level (and can only be installed once per database rather than per schema), users may prefer handling these extensions separately from their primary application schema migrations.

For example, if you maintain multiple applications – each with its own schema(s) but several relying on the same PostgreSQL extension – determining which application should handle installation, upgrades, or removal can be challenging. To address this complexity, managing extensions through a dedicated migration process is beneficial. This separation ensures extension-related changes remain isolated.

This guide demonstrates how to use the --include flag (or env.include argument) provided by Atlas to limit migrations specifically to PostgreSQL extensions.

How can I inspect a specific resource, such as a function, view, or table, using the schema --include flag?

Question​

Why does atlas migrate diff fail with the following error after running atlas migrate apply?

Error: sql/migrate: connected database is not clean: found table "atlas_schema_revisions" in schema <schema_name>. baseline version or allow-dirty is required

Question​

How to generate an SQL schema file from an existing migrations directory to quickly set up a database for integration tests?