dbmate

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for dbmate

A lightweight, framework-agnostic database migration tool

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/dbmate:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard Container for dbmate is intended as a drop-in replacement for the upstream amacneil/dbmate image, with a few security-hardening differences to be aware of when migrating:

• Non-root user. Upstream amacneil/dbmate runs as root; the Chainguard image runs as the non-root user 65532. Bind-mounted migration directories and any files dbmate writes at runtime must be readable (and, for dbmate up/dbmate new, writable) by UID 65532.
• Entrypoint path. To preserve the upstream /usr/local/bin/dbmate entrypoint, the image ships a /usr/local/bin/dbmate symlink that resolves to /usr/bin/dbmate (the canonical binary path in the underlying dbmate APK). Commands and CI pipelines that invoke dbmate ... continue to work unchanged.

Getting Started

dbmate is a database migration tool that keeps your database schema in sync across multiple developers and servers. It is written in Go and supports PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite, and ClickHouse.

Print the CLI help:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/dbmate:latest --help

Create a new migration file (written to a bind-mounted directory). Because the image runs as UID 65532, the bind-mount target has to be writable by that UID — either create it with permissive perms first, or pass --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" so dbmate writes as the invoking user:

mkdir -p db/migrations && chmod -R a+w db
docker run --rm -v "$PWD/db:/db" cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/dbmate:latest \
  new create_users_table

Apply pending migrations against a database. dbmate up's default post-run behavior writes db/schema.sql, so db/ itself needs to be writable in addition to db/migrations/:

mkdir -p db/migrations && chmod -R a+w db
docker run --rm -v "$PWD/db:/db" \
  -e DATABASE_URL="postgres://user:pass@host:5432/dbname?sslmode=disable" \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/dbmate:latest up

Documentation and Resources

• dbmate documentation — the official reference for the CLI, migration file format, and supported databases.
• amacneil/dbmate on GitHub — upstream source, release notes, and issue tracker.

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.