Local work has been stranded on one machine: `make seed` replays
seed/fixtures/seed.json, which is generated from krow-demo and has never
reflected what is in a database. Agents published through importagents,
knowledge ingested, applications screened — none of it had a path to
another deployment.
`make export-data` reads the database itself and writes replayable SQL.
Three things it does deliberately:
Tables are ordered topologically from pg_constraint rather than left in
pg_dump's own order, which sorts by name and so fails on foreign keys in a
way that depends on what the tables are called. Parents always precede
children, and Kahn's algorithm breaks ties alphabetically so two runs
against one schema produce a byte-identical file.
Every statement is INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING. The export can
create rows on a target and cannot modify or delete one. That is a
property of the generated file, not a rule someone has to remember when
they apply it.
The file refuses to apply to a schema older than the one it came from. A
restore into a half-migrated database half-succeeds, and a partial import
is harder to unpick than a failed one.
pg_dump 18 wraps its output in the psql meta-commands \restrict and
\unrestrict. Dumping per table left the closing one without its opener,
which fails with "not currently in restricted mode" and, under
--single-transaction, rolls back having inserted nothing — silently, if
the caller reads psql's output through a pipe instead of its exit code.
Each table's slice is therefore cut at the last line ending in a
semicolon, which no line of pg_dump's epilogue does and every generated
statement does.
sessions and schema_migrations are excluded: sessions are bound to cookies
one deployment issued, and a stale schema_migrations row would make the
target lie about its own version.
Verified against a scratch database migrated to 15: all 25 tables match
the source row for row, a second run is a no-op, and the guard refuses a
version-10 target.
The output is real tenant data — password hashes, personal details — so
seed/exports/ is gitignored. It moves over scp, not through git.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Aravind
8e36faff89