Hi all — is there a way to run a seed command on a prisma/express app already running in heroku? I tried to just do a

npx prisma db seed --preview-feature

from the heroku console. The command seemed to run, and then process exited but there is still no data in the DB. I have run this locally and it has worked perfectly fine.

I do it locally because it is more consistent since if you make a mistake on production weird things could happen.

Thanks @Ruslan Gonzalez totally agree on that front, but I was hoping to run the seed at least once in production (to seed specific constants, like user types for example)

so why don't you create a bootstrap script that does that for you?

Figured the seed might be able to handle that, but that is precisely the route I’m taking now after failing with the seed route

with Heroku you could use the Procfile, or just exec something from the main script using the postinstall script

good call

postinstall is a npm hook which is really nice and easy to use. But if you want to go even better, you could setup a Continuos Deployment pipeline for doing that automatically

thanks, I’ve got the heroku deployment pipeline set up automatically actually and it is running great.

SQL scripts are good but over Javascript/Typescript you have more control on validating the data, eg. if data already exists

but it seems that seeding should be one-time thing (like migrations) so cant really run a seed postinstall with every release.

BTW prisma has something for duplicated data https://www.prisma.io/docs/concepts/components/prisma-client/crud#create-multiple-records

🔥