Dealing with schema changes in Mongoose

Question

What\'s the best practice (or tool) for updating/migrating Mongoose schemas as the application evolves?

Answer 1

I just had this problem where I needed to update my database to reflect the changes to my schema. After some research I decided to try the updateMany() function in the mongo console to make the updates and I think it worked pretty well.

To apply this to vimdude's example the code would look as follows:

try { 
    db..updateMany( { birthplace: null }, { $set: 
              {"birthplace": "neverborn" } } ); 
} catch(e) { 
    print(e);
}

The updateMany() function will update all documents in a collection based on a filter. In this case the filter is looking for all documents where the field 'birthplace' is null. It then sets a new field in those documents named 'birthplace' and sets its value to 'neverborn'.

After running the code, modified to reflect your circumstances run:

db..find().pretty()

to verify that the changes were made. The new field "birthplace" with the value of "neverborn" should show at the end of each document in your collection.

Hope that helps.