Database

LibreTime is designed to work with a PostgreSQL database server and uses both the PropelORM in the legacy app and Django ORM in the API to interact with the database.

Database schema creation and migrations

The method to maintain the database schema, is to write both a migration file for already installed databases and to update a schema.sql file for fresh databases. On fresh installation, the database is filled with the schema.sql and data.sql files and LibreTime won't run any sql migration on top of it. Previously, when LibreTime was upgraded, the missing migrations were run using a custom php based migration tool, those migrations are now handled by Django. The missing migrations are tracked using both a schema_version field in the cc_pref table and a Django migration id.

note

Since LibreTime forked, the schema_version in the schema.sql was locked on 3.0.0-alpha and all the migrations were run during the first user connection. This has been fixed during the move to the Django based migrations.

Django doesn't maintain a schema.sql file, it applies every migrations until it reaches the targeted schema represented by the code. The legacy schema_version has to be tracked until we remove the Propel schema generation and let Django handle all the schema migrations. Until then Propel generate the schema and Django handle migrations from already installed databases.

info

The first Django migration is the initial schema creation using the schema.sql and data.sql files.

Modifying the database schema

To modify the database schema use the following steps:

1. Modify legacy/build/schema.xml.
2. Run make -C legacy propel-gen to regenerate the legacy files.
3. Run pre-commit run --all and make -C legacy format multiple times to clean and format the previously generated files.
4. Update the api models to reflect the changes made to the schema.
5. Create a new schema migration file in the api/legacy/migrations directory.