Atlas Best Practices

Atlas is a language-independent tool for managing database schemas using declarative or versioned workflows.

Two Workflows

Declarative (Terraform-like): Atlas compares current vs desired state and generates migrations automatically.

atlas schema apply --url "postgres://..." --to "file://schema.hcl" --dev-url "docker://postgres/15"

Versioned: Atlas generates migration files from schema changes, stored in version control.

atlas migrate diff add_users --dir "file://migrations" --to "file://schema.sql" --dev-url "docker://postgres/15"
atlas migrate apply --dir "file://migrations" --url "postgres://..."

Dev Database