Skip to the content
Documentation

Help center

Help for Software Engineers

Engineer software on Exponential: architecture, the request cycle, caching, testing, quality gates and maintainability.

85 pages

Start here

Read these pages in this order.

  1. Software engineers: start here Where software engineers start who evaluate, architect, operate, review or contribute to Exponential as a s...
  2. Add a database table A migration that creates a table of the site's own on every engine from a share/db_schema.dba definition, w...
  3. Migrations The start of everything about migrations in Exponential 6.0.15 - schema and content changes written once as...
  4. Migrations versus migrating a site The word migration means two different jobs in the Exponential documentation - migrations (schema and conte...
  5. Create or change a content class A migration that creates the content class news_article with its attributes and class group, the same way o...
  6. Change content in bulk A migration that walks every object of a class in batches, publishes a new version of each one that needs t...

Good to know

  • Migrations for software engineers

    The migration model of Exponential 6.0.15 for engineers - ordered, recorded, checksum-guarded, captioned and committed changes - its architecture next to the .dba schema files and the upgrade steps, the design rules for…

  • Migrations

    The start of everything about migrations in Exponential 6.0.15 - schema and content changes written once as files under version control and applied to every installation of a site in the same order, with a caption…

  • Schema changes and migrations

    How a database schema change reaches every installation of Exponential - the .dba schema files for new installations, upgrade steps that exp:upgrade applies to every installation of the kernel or an extension, and…

  • Testing migrations: check, simulate, diff and CI

    Four layers of tests for migrations - the lint without a database, the dry run, the simulation with a diff on PostgreSQL or SQLite, and a PHPUnit test on a throwaway SQLite database - and how to run them in CI.

  • Deploying with migrations: CI/CD and GitHub Actions

    Run migrations as part of every deploy - the order of the steps, a complete GitHub Actions workflow that checks pull requests and deploys over SSH, the exit codes a pipeline acts on, the installation lock, and runs…

  • Reviewing a migration in code review

    A checklist for reviewing a migration in a pull request - the file and header, the order, plan(), up() and down(), engines and transactions, ids that differ between installations, personal data, and what the reviewer…

Search by topic

Each button lists the pages of one topic for Software Engineers.

Free documentation: use it to help yourself and others

This help is free documentation, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later. You may use it, share it and improve it:

  • Study it Read any page as often as you like, for any purpose.
  • Copy it and share it Give pages to other users, on paper or as files. Keep the copyright notice, the license notice and a copy of the license with every copy.
  • Translate, adapt and improve it Share your version under the same license, with the original notices and a note of what you changed.
  • Cite it Refer to a page by its title and its address in the help, or its file in the doc directory.
  • Contribute fixes back Use "Edit on GitHub" on any page. Changes are accepted under the same license, so they stay free for everyone.

Exponential Copyright © 1998-2026 Exponential Foundation and 7x