After working with Sequelize and deploying my application to Heroku, I found myself needing to drop a table in the production database. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to drop a Sequelize table in Heroku’s bash environment.
Accessing Heroku Bash
To begin, I accessed my Heroku application’s bash shell by running the following command:
heroku run bash
This command opens a bash shell within my Heroku application’s environment, allowing me to interact with the production database directly.
Connecting to the Database
Once inside the Heroku bash shell, I connected to the PostgreSQL database associated with my application using the following command:
psql DATABASE_URL
Replace DATABASE_URL with the actual URL of your Heroku Postgres database, which can be found in your Heroku dashboard.
Dropping the Table
Now that I was connected to the database, I ran the SQL command to drop the Sequelize table. In my case, the table was named users, so I used the following SQL command:
DROP TABLE users;
Replace users with the name of the table you want to drop. Be careful with this step, as dropping a table is irreversible and will permanently delete all data within the table.
Exiting and Verifying
After dropping the table, I exited the PostgreSQL prompt by typing \q. I then exited the Heroku bash shell by typing exit.
It’s important to verify that the table has been dropped by checking your application’s behavior. You can also reconnect to the database and run the command \dt to list all tables and confirm that the table no longer exists.
Conclusion
With these steps, I was able to successfully drop a Sequelize table in Heroku’s bash environment. Remember to exercise caution when performing operations directly on a production database, and always make sure to have backups in place to prevent data loss.