Skipping Constraint Renames in Schema Migrations

How do I instruct Atlas to not generate RENAME commands for table constraints in schema migrations when running commands such as migrate diff, schema apply, schema plan, etc.?

Answer

Atlas supports loading database schema definitions from HCL, SQL, and ORM-based sources. When using ORMs like GORM or Django, which don't support naming all database constraints explicitly, the database often generates names automatically when creating them. This can lead to inconsistencies between the unnamed constraints defined in the schema and those that exist in the actual database.

As part of the migration planning process, Atlas loads the desired schema into a dev-database, and since the dev-database may generate different constraint names than the live database, Atlas might emit RENAME statements in schema migration plans to reconcile these differences.

These rename operations are unnecessary and clutter migration history, as they're not meaningful and often result from random naming. Therefore, to skip comparing constraint names and avoid generating RENAME commands, use the diff.skip block in your atlas.hcl configuration:

env "local" {
  diff {
    skip {
      rename_constraint = true
    }
  }
}

For more details on the diff.skip configuration and its available attributes, please refer to our documentation.