FAILED: No config file 'alembic.ini' found

Question

I tried to change in Alembic but when I try to run Alembic current I got error. I'm new in alembic, please tell me why I get this error and how can I solve it?

I can see alembic.ini in migration folder and also revision identifiers, used by Alembic and everything seems fine.

$alembic current
No handlers could be found for logger "alembic.util"
  FAILED: No config file 'alembic.ini' found, or file has no '[alembic]' section

20c921506336_.py:

"""empty message

Revision ID: 20c921506336
Revises: None
Create Date: 2015-01-30 16:28:38.981023

"""

# revision identifiers, used by Alembic.
revision = '20c921506336'
down_revision = None

from alembic import op
import sqlalchemy as sa


def upgrade():
    ### commands auto generated by Alembic - please adjust! ###
    op.create_table('user',
    sa.Column('id', sa.Integer(), nullable=False),
    sa.Column('name', sa.String(length=50), nullable=True),
    sa.Column('email', sa.String(length=50), nullable=True),
    sa.Column('age', sa.Integer(), nullable=True),
    sa.Column('bestfriend_id', sa.Integer(), nullable=True),
    sa.ForeignKeyConstraint(['bestfriend_id'], ['user.id'], ),
    sa.PrimaryKeyConstraint('id')
    )
    op.create_index(u'ix_user_age', 'user', ['age'], unique=True)
    op.create_index(u'ix_user_email', 'user', ['email'], unique=True)
    op.create_index(u'ix_user_name', 'user', ['name'], unique=True)
    op.create_table('friends',
    sa.Column('user_id', sa.Integer(), nullable=True),
    sa.Column('friend_id', sa.Integer(), nullable=True),
    sa.ForeignKeyConstraint(['friend_id'], ['user.id'], ),
    sa.ForeignKeyConstraint(['user_id'], ['user.id'], )
    )
    ### end Alembic commands ###


def downgrade():
    ### commands auto generated by Alembic - please adjust! ###
    op.drop_table('friends')
    op.drop_index(u'ix_user_name', table_name='user')
    op.drop_index(u'ix_user_email', table_name='user')
    op.drop_index(u'ix_user_age', table_name='user')
    op.drop_table('user')
    ### end Alembic commands ###

Answer 1

You must cd to the directory that has the alembic.ini to run the alembic command, that is, the alembic.ini must be found in the current working directory; or you can specify the config file location with alembic -c path/to/alembic.ini.

And it seems that your alembic ini is broken, you ought to have script_location in there, thus if your migrations are in the alembic subdirectory, alembic.ini should read something like:

[alembic]
script_location = alembic

# Logging configuration
[loggers]
keys = root,sqlalchemy,alembic

[handlers]
keys = console

[formatters]
keys = generic

[logger_root]
level = WARN
handlers = console
qualname =

[logger_sqlalchemy]
level = WARN
handlers =
qualname = sqlalchemy.engine

[logger_alembic]
level = INFO
handlers =
qualname = alembic

[handler_console]
class = StreamHandler
args = (sys.stderr,)
level = NOTSET
formatter = generic

[formatter_generic]
format = %(levelname)-5.5s [%(name)s] %(message)s
datefmt = %H:%M:%S

The directory layout must be so that if your script_location = alembic it means that you have:

alembic.ini
alembic/   # this must match the script_location in alembic.ini
    env.py   # and this must be found at the script_location
    script.py.mako
    versions/
        20c921506336_.py

Answer 2

For a deploy script doing something like this:

ssh ... alembic upgrade head

Antii's answer provides the direct answer which is the -c option:

ssh ... alembic -c /path/to/alembic.ini upgrade head

However then you may get like me:

FAILED: Path doesn't exist: 'alembic'. Please use the 'init' command to create a new scripts folder.

Alembic is failing to interpret your intention for script_location in alembic.ini. Usually you run alembic from the directory with alembic.ini and alembic is able to interpret your script_location as a relative path.

However when you run it with a simple deploy script or otherwise from a different directory, it doesn't know where to look and it does not use the directory of alembic.ini to guess the location (as I think Antii suggested?).

If you look in the alembic source code here, you can see that alembic wants either 1) an absolute path, 2) a package path or 3) a relative path from the working directory (the default case).

Therefore the second level of this answer is

Option 1: Absolute path

(I haven't tested this!) Provide an absolute path to the alembic directory in alembic.ini. This doesn't work for me because the code becomes unportable:

...
script_location = /path/to/alembic/
...

Option 2: Package path

Provide a package path in alembic.ini:

...
script_location = rootpackage:alembic  # or maybe rootpacakge.xyz:alembic
...

and of course it will actually need to be a package so the location with alembic.ini must have __init__.py.

Option 3: Relative path

Instead of running alembic upgrade directly in your deploy script, make a bash script to cd to the right directory and then run it.