Overview

QB ships with a schema builder to help you build your database objects. This provides a few benefits:

• The syntax is expressive and fluent, making it easy to understand what is being executed

• The syntax is database-agnostic. Specific quirks are isolated in a Grammar file, making it easy to migrate between engines.

You start with a SchemaBuilder object. The SchemaBuilder takes the same Grammar that a QueryBuilder takes.

// manually
var schema = new qb.models.schema.SchemaBuilder(
    new qb.models.grammars.MySQLGrammar()
);

// WireBox
var schema = wirebox.getInstance( "SchemaBuilder@qb" );

Note: the SchemaBuilder is a transient, and a new one should be created for each operation.

The SchemaBuilder has four main methods to start your database object creation:

create

Create a new table in the database.

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
table	string	true		The name of the table to create.
callback	function	true		A callback function used to define the table body. It is passed a Blueprint as the only argument.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

The majority of the work comes from calling methods on the Blueprint object. A Blueprint defines the columns and indexes for your tables.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.create( "users", function( table ) {
    table.increments( "id" );
    table.string( "email" );
    table.string( "password" );
    table.timestamp( "created_date" ).nullable();
    table.timestamp( "modified_date" ).nullable();
} );

SQL (MySQL)

CREATE TABLE `users` (
    `id` INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `email` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    `password` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    `created_date` TIMESTAMP,
    `modified_date` TIMESTAMP,
    CONSTRAINT `pk_users_id` PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

alter

Alter an existing table in the database.

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
table	string	true		The name of the table to alter.
callback	function	true		A callback function used to define the changes to the table. It is passed a Blueprint as the only argument.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

In addition to using the columns and indexes off of the passed-in Blueprint object, the Blueprint contains helpers such as addConstraint, removeConstraint, addColumn, renameColumn, and dropColumn to assist in altering existing tables.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.alter( "users", function( table ) {
    table.addConstraint( table.unique( "username" ) );
    table.dropColumn( "last_logged_in" );
} );

SQL (MySQL)

ALTER TABLE `users` ADD CONSTRAINT `unq_users_username` UNIQUE (`username`);
ALTER TABLE `users` DROP COLUMN `last_logged_in`;

drop and dropIfExists

Drop a table from the database.

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
table	string	true		The name of the table to drop.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.drop( "user_logins" );

SQL (MySQL)

DROP TABLE `user_logins`

Additionally, there are a few utility methods defined on SchemaBuilder as well:

rename

Rename a table from an old name to a new name

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
from	string	true		The old table name.
to	string	true		The new table name.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.rename( "posts", "blog_posts" );

SQL (MySQL)

RENAME TABLE `posts` TO `blog_posts`

hasTable

Check if a table exists in the database.

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
name	string	true		The name of the table to check.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.hasTable( "users" );

SQL (MySQL)

SELECT 1
FROM `information_schema`.`tables`
WHERE `table_name` = 'users'

hasColumn

Check if a column exists in a table in the database.

Argument	Type	Required	Default	Description
table	string	true		The name of the table to check for the column in.
column	string	true		The column to check for in the table.
options	struct	false	{}	Options to pass to queryExecute.
execute	boolean	false	true	Run the query immediately after building it.

Example:

SchemaBuilder

schema.hasColumn( "users", "last_logged_in" );

SQL (MySQL)

SELECT 1
FROM `information_schema`.`columns`
WHERE `table_name` = 'users'
    AND `column_name` = 'last_logged_in'