CLI

A set of CLI tools to interact with drift projects

Experimental

The drift cli tool is experimental at the moment. Please report all issues you can find.

Usage#

If your app depends on drift_dev, you're ready to use the CLI tool. In this article, we'll use dart run drift_dev to start the tool. The tool should be run from the same folder where you keep your pubspec.yaml.

Analyze#

Runs drift's analyzer and linter across all .drift files in your project.

$ dart run drift_dev analyze

WARNING: For file test/data/tables/tables.drift:
WARNING: line 38, column 28: This table has columns without default values, so defaults can't be used for insert.
   ╷
38 │ defaultConfig: INSERT INTO config DEFAULT VALUES;
   │                            ^^^^^^
   ╵
INFO: Found 1 errors or problems

Exits with error code 1 if any error was found.

Identify databases#

This is more of a test command to verify that drift's analyzer is working correctly. It will identify all databases or daos defined in your project. 

$ dart run drift_dev identify-databases

Starting to scan in /tmp/example/ ...
INFO: example/example.dart has drift databases or daos: Database
INFO: lib/src/data/database.dart has drift databases or daos: AppDatabase
INFO: test/fake_db.dart has drift databases or daos: TodoDb, SomeDao

Schema tools#

Dump for version control#

This subcommand expects two paths, a Dart file and a target. The Dart file should contain exactly one class annotated with @DriftDatabase. Running the following command will export the database schema to json. 

$ dart run drift_dev schema dump path/to/database.dart schema.json

The generated file (schema.json in this case) contains information about all

  • tables, including detailed information about columns
  • triggers
  • indices
  • @create-queries from included drift files
  • dependencies thereof

Exporting a schema can be used to generate test code for your schema migrations. For details, see the guide.

Exporting#

In some cases, it can be beneficial to export a list of CREATE statements that define a drift database. The schema export command does just that. It takes a path to a Dart source file defining a drift database as an argument: 

$ dart run drift_dev schema export path/to/database.dart

It will output all statements that would be run by drift if the database were freshly created, each statement on its own line.

The optional --dialect option on schema export can be used to control the target dialect of the generated statements. It defaults to sqlite and experimentally also supports postgres and mariadb.