Grails database migration plugins

Question

There are at least two Grails plugins that emulate the database migration functionality of Rails:

• Autobase
• Liquibase

Is there a consensus a

Answer 1

I use Autobase (which is built on top of Liquibase) as it (last time I checked) allows you to automatically check/apply your migrations when the app starts. With the Liquibase plugin I have to do this myself in servlet init code. This allows you to set your datasource to dbCreate = none and let Autobase handle getting the DB into shape.

It does mean you need to write a migration each time you add a property to a domain class, but I think this is a good thing as it makes you think about what the underlying field should actually be instead of just letting Hibernate take a guess at it.

I think some of the Autobase plugin (e.g. the groovy dsl) is being migrated back to the Liquibase plugin, but you'd need to check up on that.

The only downside to Autobase is the lack of good documentation. There is some but it's not complete. Luckily, the dsl is the same as the xml Liquibase tags so you can work most of it out.