CLI: hasura migrate apply --down could validate the argument value and abort if it's absurdly big

[floer32]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Recently I meant to run this command:

hasura migrate apply --type=down --version=1659058116550

But recalling the flags from memory, I accidentally ran this command instead:

hasura migrate apply --down=1659058116550

This was interpreted as wanting to go down N migrations where N = 1659058116550. I think it's safe to assume that is never what the operator intended.

Luckily, this was in a dev environment. That's actually why I didn't use --dry-run first. But it still caused a headache. Even though I killed the command after 5 or 10 seconds (when I realized what was going on), it had time to get the database into an invalid state. (And not just a state of bad migrations. It was a pgaudit stack is not empty error. But since it was just a dev database, I was able to roll back a day then just the correct migration commands and things were fine.)

Human errors are inevitable and these flags can be confused, so I think this is a good opportunity for some validation.

Describe the solution you'd like

Perhaps --down¹ could have a guard on this number, and if it's above some threshold it would require confirmation. The number could be, say, the seconds-since-the-epoch when the Hasura project was started.

Describe alternatives you've considered

(Easier for me to phrase as questions)

• Should it require interactive confirmation in that event, or just an additional flag?
• Should it just refuse to proceed at all, since it's so unlikely that it could be intended?

If the feature is approved, would you be willing to submit a PR?

Yes.

Footnotes

1. (... and perhaps --up but the impact would be smaller, since there won't be so many up-migrations that could be applied) ↩