Database Versioning with DBV

It’s good practice to always use a version control system in any of your projects. Be it a side-project in which you are the only developer, or a team project where five or more people are working on it together. But the idea of putting your database into version control isn’t really that widespread. Often times we take the database for granted.

But like the source files in our project, the database is constantly changing too. That’s why we also need a way to track the changes that we have made and easily share it to other members of our team.

In this article we will take a look at DBV, a database version control system written in PHP for MySQL databases so you need to have PHP and MySQL installed before you can use it, along with a web server like Apache or Nginx.

An important note about this software is that it is not a stand-alone database version control system, because it needs a version control system such as Git, Mercurial or SVN for syncing changes with your team.

Installing DBV

To start working with DBV, first you have to download the installer from their website, extract it into your project directory then rename the resulting folder to dbv. This will give you the following path:

my_project/dbv 

An alternative approach is just cloning from Github.

DBV Configuration

You can start configuring the options for DBV by creating a copy of the config.php.sample file and renaming it to config.php.

The most important things to update here are the first two sections. Just substitute the values for my_username, my_password, my_database for the values in your current database configuration:

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