Single line command for migrating multiple databases

[SomeAB]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow Django's Code of Conduct

Feature Description

I believe that the behavior of the --database flag can be improved slightly, while keeping the explicitness requirement

Proposed Behavior:

# Maintained Behavior: migrate is performed only on the 'default' database
./manage.py migrate 

# New Behavior: A single command needed to perform migrate on multiple databases
./manage.py migrate --database=default,users,customers

PS: Its possible that the proposed behavior is already supported and only the documentation needs updating about it? If so, then a documentation issue could be opened alternatively.

Problem

While going through the official documentation, I noticed currently when you have multiple databases, and you want to migrate them, you have to write multiple commands

Current Behavior:

./manage.py migrate # Performs migration on only the 'default' database

# Then two commands more needed for the remaining two databases
./manage.py migrate --database=users 
./manage.py migrate --database=customers

Request or proposal

request

Additional Details

No response

Implementation Suggestions

No response

[github-actions]

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Reaction Guide

• 👍 This is something I would use
• 👎 This is something that would cause problems for me or Django
• 😕 I’m indifferent to this
• 🎉 This is an easy win

[rixx]

That would be handy – and if we go for space-separated rather than comma-separated database names, we can leave the parsing to the configparser module by setting nargs="*" in the --databases argument setup.

This would slightly change the exit code semantics of the migrate command, though – currently, you can be sure that a successful exit means that the migrations ran to completion, and a failing exit code indicates that something went wrong and the migrations were rolled back. This would not be the case when targeting multiple databases at the same time. Not a problem per-se, but an added complexity, which would also probably change the output format of the command (that you'd hope people aren't parsing in their scripts from STDOUT, but …).

So while I think that the functionality might be nice, I'm not sure adding that level of complexity to the command is better than to tell users that they can run

python manage.py migrate --database {users,customers}

(or the appropriate variant for their shell of choice), and handle partial migration failures as they see fit.

[nanuxbe]

I would be 👍 on this if it was a 3rd party package. Having multiple databases to start with is a bit niche. Having multiple managed databases is even more niche (ie: a common use-case is to connect to databases that are managed by other application + having one for the django project itself)