EF Core - Running migrations without sources - Equivalent of EF6's migrate.exe

Question

Is it possible to run an ef migration from DLL containing migrations and dbcontext? I'd like to run dotnet ef database update against my build artefacts without need of project.json and source codes.

In other words I'm looking for an equivalent of migrate.exe https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/jj618307.aspx from EF6

Answer 1

My team colleague found a way which allows you to run migrations on build artefacts without sources. Following command replace migrate.exe for us:

dotnet exec 
  --runtimeconfig ./HOST.runtimeconfig.json 
  --depsfile ./HOST.deps.json Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design.dll
  --assembly ./DB_CONTEXT_DLL.dll 
  --startup-assembly ./HOST.dll --data-dir ./ 
  --root-namespace DB_CONTEXT_NAMESPACE 
  --verbose database update --context DB_CONTEXT_CLASS -e development 

Update for 2.1.x version:

dotnet exec 
   --runtimeconfig ./HOST.runtimeconfig.json 
   --depsfile ./HOST.deps.json /PATH/TO/microsoft.entityframeworkcore.tools/.../ef.dll 
   --verbose database update --context DB_CONTEXT_CLASS
   --assembly ./DB_CONTEXT_DLL.dll 
   --startup-assembly ./HOST.dll --data-dir ./

Answer 2

Seems not possible run dotnet ef database update only with the DLL, and if you use the docker, the actual version of runtime microsoft/dotnet:1.1.0-preview1-runtime do not have the sdk installed (with the dotnet ef database update command).

One option to update database without use dotnet ef database update is execute the command bellow in some default action or startup routine.

_dbContext.Database.Migrate();