What do you mean with "change the database, it blows away all the generated content"?
In general, your production environment has one database which doesn't change on deployments or new features. You don't want to lose your data of course ;)
Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
Bare with me, my noob will be showing pretty shamelessly here.
I’m developing a social media site and want to deploy it for a couple of friends to test out and provide feedback. However, whenever you change the database, it blows away all the generated content. The nature of my project is complex enough that i absolutely need realworld test driving experimentation to get the database relationships right in an intuitive way.
My questions are, what is best practice for this scenario? Do you just nullify new columns on existing content? Is it just the nature of the beast and an expectation i need to manage for my friends if the content does empty between major feature changes? Is there a nice backup and autofill database tool to be utilizing in case this happens? And finally do i need to keep anything in mind regarding relationships where corrupting the database might be inevitable in some cases?
Please or to participate in this conversation.