I am setting up an Azure Release Pipeline and I need to execute any pending DB Migrations as part of the release.
I have been scouring the internet for over an hour and everything I can find is about .NET Core, while the database is EF6 on .NET Framework, not .NET Core (I've done this several times before for Core).
The problem, as I see it, is that EF6 works using Visual Studio's built in Package Manager Console - This just doesn't exist in an Azure Pipeline; It's a Visual Studio weirdness.
I can't figure out how to start within the context of the pipeline...
OPTION 1: Run the Migrations on the Pipeline - but... how?
OPTION 2: SQL Scripts - Requires running the Package Manager to generate them so they can be run (if I could do that on the pipeline then I'd just run it anyway so these would have to be created locally and committed with the code which is somewhat backward as a solution IMO)
OPTION 3: Write a console app - Do I really have to do this?
The answer here is to use the ef6.exe command line tool and make sure it gets shipped with your build.
This could be useful to anyone here until Microsoft update the non-existent docs: http://github.com/dotnet/EntityFramework.Docs/issues/1740 - This contains a table with a kind of translation matrix between the two.