QUquectophoton·Feb 7, 2026Submission
Atlas: Manage your database schema as code
2 points · Open discussionariga
atlas
Go2022–2026
ariga / atlas
atlas
Declarative schema migrations with schema-as-code workflows
8Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
8.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Declarative schema migrations with schema-as-code workflows
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-01-23 06:55:19 UTC to 2026-02-07 10:36:18 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesWhat do you think of the approach that pg_roll takes?
Seems like the top contenders, at least for Postgres, are:
sqldef: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845239
pgschema: https://github.com/pgschema/pgschema
pg_roll: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll
atlas: https://github.com/ariga/atlas
grate (minimal SQL-based migrations): https://grate-devs.github.io/grate/
pg-schema-diff: https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff
results: https://github.com/djrobstep/results
https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...
In Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLiteI use https://github.com/ariga/atlas for this, migration based and schema base both has there good and bad side, I prefer both even in one project, schema based can make dev faster, eaiser, migration based make feel reliable.
In Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLiteI've been looking at Atlas as an alternative to Alembic recently, it seems nice, but I'm wary of the non open source features.
https://github.com/ariga/atlas
In CLI to manage your SQL database schemas and migrationsAtlas: Manage your database schema as code
7 points · Open discussionCheck out: https://github.com/ariga/atlas. It’s like Terraform for databases.
(I'm one of the authors of this project).
In Pgroll: zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for PostgresI haven't tried this, but I think you can get fairly close by generating the HTTP/SQL serialization code. When I get time I want to write an openapi schema amd generate the server code, write a db schema and generate the db code (I want to try https://github.com/ariga/atlas with Ent for this), then write the business logic between them and see how well it all works
In Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary taleYes. The migration is built on top of Atlas: https://github.com/ariga/atlas
In Ent: An Entity Framework for GoI agree with that as well. The idea is to create an infrastructure for SQL parsers. Base parser will hold all standard structure and dialects can register custom clauses/statements. At the moment, I generate PEG files for each dialect, but this creates too much duplicate code, and does not allow sharing same types/objects between different dialects.
I thought about keeping it on the same GitHub repository (https://github.com/ariga/atlas), but as a separate Go module? WDYT?
In Atlas – Terraform but for Database MigrationsHey, I'm one of the atlas's creator. Thanks for the feedback.
I'm actually familiar with all the things you mentioned here (I worked at FB too ;)), and some of them are the reasons why we decided to create atlas and OSS it.
First, atm, we support HCL and Go (with fluent API) for describing schemas, but in the next versions, we'll add support for SQL DDLs (e.g. "CREATE TABLE", "CREATE INDEX", etc). Can't promise time estimation because it's in development, but that means we plan to OSS with it an SQL-parser infrastructure for the supported databases (can elaborate on that if you want).
Before I continue to migration authoring, I want to mention the reason we chose HCL (or Go). In next versions, we plan to support attaching "annotations" to schemas, like in k8s or in ent [1]. We these annotations, you'll be able to define privacy policy, or
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create integration to other tool. More details in the near future.
Now, migration authoring. The CLI does not expose all functionalities that are covered by the core engine atm, but when you run this tool (apply/plan) the output is a list of SQL statements. The core engine already knows to generate the "reverse" command for each statement (if it is reversible), and also a summary that indicates if the migration is "transactional" and "reversible" (see example [2]).
Next version of atlas is going to support "migration authoring" - that means, instead of generate you list of statements and execute them (after approve), we'll let you the option to generate them to a directory, edit them, and integrate them with tools like flyway, go-migrate, etc.
In addition to that, the engine is also going to suggest you to break a migration plan to multiple steps (like a DBA) in order to make it transactional or reversible if it is not.
[1]: https://entgo.io
[2]: https://github.com/ariga/atlas/blob/master/sql/postgres/migr...