vendure-ecommerce/vendure

Problem

A fresh app created with @vendure/create ships with dbConnectionOptions.synchronize: false and a migrations glob, but no migration files. As a result, the first deployment against a fresh/empty production database creates no tables — the schema is never built, and nothing in the flow explains why.

This is currently masked during local development because @vendure/create force-sets synchronize: true while populating the seed data, so the local schema is created by synchronize, not by a migration. The gap therefore only surfaces on the first real deployment, where nothing turns synchronize on.

The manual workaround — temporarily enabling synchronize: true for the first deploy, or hand-generating an initial migration against a throwaway empty database — is not something a first-time user would know to do, and synchronize: true is not acceptable for production.

Root cause

generateMigration() produces a migration by diffing the entity metadata against whatever database is currently connected (TypeORM's SchemaBuilder.log()):

against an empty database → the diff is the full schema (exactly the "initial migration" we want);
against a populated database → the diff is empty, so no migration can be generated.

Scenario	Result
`--from-empty` against an empty Postgres	full baseline (87 `CREATE TABLE` + 260 `ALTER TABLE`)
plain generate against a populated DB	"No changes found" — reproduces the bug
`--from-empty` against a populated DB	full baseline anyway
shadow DB lifecycle	created and dropped, no leaks, target DB untouched
scaffold path (generate → runMigrations → populate)	88 tables created and recorded in the `migrations` table
SQLite `--from-empty` (in-memory)	full baseline, real db file untouched

Scaffolded app ships no initial migration — first deploy against an empty database creates no schema#4958

Problem

Root cause

Proposed solution

1. Generate an initial migration at scaffold time (`@vendure/create`)

2. Add a shadow-database baseline mode to the CLI

Prototype status

Remaining work

Scaffolded app ships no initial migration — first deploy against an empty database creates no schema#4958

Problem

Root cause

Proposed solution

1. Generate an initial migration at scaffold time (@vendure/create)

2. Add a shadow-database baseline mode to the CLI

Prototype status

Remaining work

1. Generate an initial migration at scaffold time (`@vendure/create`)