How best to run one-off migration tasks in a kubernetes cluster

Question

I have database migrations which I\'d like to run before deploying a new version of my app into a Kubernetes cluster. I want these migrations to be run automatically as part of

Answer 1

Considering the age of this question I'm not sure if initContainers were available at the time but they are super helpful now.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/init-containers/

The way I recently set this up was to have a postgres pod and our django application running in the same namespace, however the django pod has 3 initContainers:

1. init-migrations
2. init-fixtures
3. init-createsuperUser

What this will do is run the django pod and the postgres pod in parallel but also continuously run the initContainers until the postgres pod comes up and then your migrations should run.

As for the pods perpetually restarting, maybe they've fixed the restartPolicy by now. I'm currently pretty new to kubernetes but this is what I've found works for me.