Efcore: Deployment and Database Creation/Migration

[rowanmiller]

For local development we introduced a piece of middleware in ASP.NET 5 that provides instruction on using migrations.

We are currently working to replace the 'apply migrations on app start' functionality with something better.

[rowanmiller]

For deployment to Azure (which is one of the key Right Click -> Publish scenarios in VS) I have prototyped using Azure WebJobs (with a triggered job) to apply migrations during deployment and it works pretty nicely. You can just invoke k ef migration apply on the code base using the version of KRE that is deployed with the app.

Will discuss with @sayedihashimi when he is back in the office.

Here is a sample of the WebJob command I was using. This is very similar to the *.cmd files we already produce when publishing to disk.

"%HOME%\site\approot\packages\KRE-CLR-x86.1.0.0-beta2-10709\bin\klr.exe" --appbase "%HOME%\site\approot\src\ToDo" Microsoft.Framework.ApplicationHost ef migration apply --context "ToDo.Models.ApplicationDbContext"

[rowanmiller]

Agreed upon design is here https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework/wiki/Visual-Studio-Publish-Integration

[divega]

Assigning temporarily to myself to follow up with the tooling folks to figure out how we land this in RC2.

[ryanerdmann]

I know this issue is primarily about the VS right-click Publish integration story, but do you also have any recommendations for how to manage migrations for customers using git deployment (Kudu) to Azure?

I have several web apps using that deployment scenario, and for now I’ve just settled with using ef migrations script -i and running the script from my client machine. Would it make sense instead to use a custom Kudu deployment script that, similar to the process outlined here, would run ef migrations script -i and use MsDeploy to execute the script during deployment?

I wouldn’t expect any official tooling support, but it would be great if there was some guidance (even just a paragraph in the docs or wiki) with a recommended approach to using migrations with Kudu deployments.

[rowanmiller]

@ryanerdmann I've opened https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework/issues/5207 to sort this out.

[rowanmiller]

Apply migrations during publish is now enabled and will ship in RC2... and the nasty apply migrations code in Startup.cs is being removed from the templates 🎉 🎆 💃