Catch the dangerous Postgres migration at the CI step

-- looks routine in review, locks your table in production: CREATE INDEX idx_orders_customer ON orders ( customer_id ); ALTER TABLE users ALTER COLUMN email SET NOT NULL ; Both of those statements hold a lock that blocks traffic while they scan or build against the table. On a small table you never notice. On a busy production table it is downtime, and a diff review does not catch it because the SQL looks fine. pg-migration-guard is a free tool that reads the migration and flags these before they reach production: $ pg-migration-guard V42__orders.sql WARN IDX01 CREATE INDEX without CONCURRENTLY [becomes a blocker on a large or busy table] Why: Plain CREATE INDEX takes a lock that blocks all writes until the build finishes. Safe: CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY idx ON tbl (col); -- outside a transaction WARN NN01 SET NOT NULL scans the whole table under ACCESS EXCLUSIVE Safe: ADD CONSTRAINT c CHECK (col IS NOT NULL) NOT VALID; VALIDATE CONSTRAINT c; then SET NOT NULL; Summary: 0 blocker, 2 warn, 0 advisory Why migrations bite Whether a Postgres migration is safe has almost nothing to do with intent and everything to do with locks. A migration is dangerous when it holds a strong lock while it scans or rewrites a large table. ACCESS EXCLUSIVE blocks reads and writes; SHARE blocks writes. The change that reads fine in review is the one that quietly takes that lock. Put it in CI The most useful place for this is the pull request, so a risky migration fails the build before anyone merges it. There is a GitHub Action: name : migration-guard on : pull_request : paths : [ " db/migration/**.sql" ] jobs : guard : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v4 - uses : actions/setup-python@v5 with : python-version : " 3.x" - uses : technical-turtle/pg-migration-guard@v1 with : path : db/migration fail-on : blocker Each finding shows up as an inline annotation on the diff, so the author sees exactly which line is the problem and what the safe rewrite is. Or run it locall