How to deploy to production with entity framework code first

Question

I'm coming from asp.net Web Forms switching to MVC and entity framework code first approach. I have a question. How can I set up my environment to deploy to production?

I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and deploys a web deploy package. Locally I have SQL Express and in production, I have SQL Server 2008.

What I want is to develop an test locally on my pc and from time to time deploy my solution to production with a web deploy package. I don't want to run migrations in the production system, instead, I want to generate scripts from visual studio which I then can append to production SQL.

I tried to:

• Create Initial migration in dev.
• Update database locally
• Generate script, update-database -script -sourcemigration:InitialCreate
• Apply this script in production
• Deploy the application to production

Is this the correct approach? What about my migrations that will run locally, will they not in production to when I deploy because of my migrations code?

In global.asax

Migrator.RunMigrations();

where RunMigrations is a static method in a custom Migrator class like this

public class Migrator
    {
        public static void RunMigrations()
        {
            var migrator = new Configuration();
            var dbMigrator = new System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrator(migrator);
            if (dbMigrator.GetPendingMigrations().Any())
            {
                dbMigrator.Update();
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

You can with Web Setup Project (for the installation an MSI Custom Action is needed):

The actual work of updating the database is can be done by the migrate.exe tool. To make the MSI package run it properly turned out to be a bit of a challenge. I first included migrate.exe in the installation package to have it deployed to the bin directory together with the assemblies of the system. There is support for running a .exe file as a custom action in the web setup projects. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get migrate.exe to work unless the working directory was set to the bin directory. The working directory for custom actions is c:\windows\system32 by default. To handle that, a small vb-script was used.

http://coding.abel.nu/2012/04/update-database-msi-custom-action/

UPDATE:

I found this, this and this, maybe it will help.