Show HN: DbDeclare – A Python declarative layer for your database

3 points

3 years ago

Hi HN! I made and just published v0.0.1 of DbDeclare. I use Python a lot, and interact with Postgres a lot. I like using SQLAlchemy, and I love Alembic. Those wonderful tools primarily operate on tables, though, and I often find myself writing custom code to declare what databases, roles, schemas, privileges, etc. I want, and I have a hard time updating them reliably and in a repeatable fashion.

That's where DbDeclare aims to help: declare what you want in your cluster (in addition to SQLAlchemy-defined tables and columns) in-code, alongside your tables. There is a lot this can't do yet (thus the v0.0.1), but I think there's a decent foundation here to build on and eventually have really nice features like autogenerating change statements between your in-code definition and what is actually in your database cluster (like Alembic).

This is also my first attempt at building an open-source project, so I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes. Please feel free to provide feedback, I'd love to make it better.

For what it's worth, I'm aware that you can do some of this at the infrastructure-as-code layer using a tool like Terraform/Pulumi. My personal preference is to have all this sit closer to my tables rather than my infrastructure, so here we are.

Anyway, let me know what y'all think. Thanks!