Roles, permissions, plan tiers, workflow states: the rows your app ships with change every release, and admins change them too. Bootstrapping merges the two, value by value, keeps every local edit, and stops to ask when both sides changed the same thing.
492,228
Values checked across 1,200 random histories of seed versions and admin edits, none overwritten without a conflict
400
Applies killed with SIGKILL, every database found exactly as before or exactly as after
1 of 8
Processes applying the same seed to one file at once that write, in each of 60 rounds
129,632
Checks that values compare the way SQLite stores them, across 16 column types
Measured on Linux x86-64 with 2 CPUs. Every number comes from the test results in the repository.
release
Bootstrapping 0.2 is out. It runs on PostgreSQL now, as well as SQLite, with the same seed files, the same three-way merge and the same ledger. Long lists like countries …
explainer
Every application ships with rows it can’t run without. The roles a new account gets. The permissions behind them. Plan tiers, order states, ticket priorities, the …
launch
Bootstrapping 0.1 is out, open source under the Apache License 2.0. It keeps the reference data an application ships with, roles, permissions, plan tiers and the like, in …
testing
A tool that writes to customers’ databases on every release makes a few promises, and each one is the kind you only find broken in production. An admin’s edit …
the name
To bootstrap a computer is to take it from nothing to running: a tiny first program loads a bigger one, which loads the system. The word comes from the old joke about …
case studies
Country and currency lists look like the most static data an application has. They aren’t. Croatia replaced the kuna with the euro on 1 January 2023. Turkey asked …
case studies
Email templates are the reference data customers change most. A self-hosted product ships a welcome email, a password reset and an invoice notice. Each customer’s …
case studies
Workflow states are reference data with consequences. A helpdesk ships states like new, open, resolved and closed. Every ticket points at one, and each state names the …
case studies
A product sold as a self-hosted install ships its plan tiers as data: Free, Team, Business, the seat limit of each, and which features each one turns on. The product team …
If your application ships roles, permissions, plans or other seed data that customers then edit, the project would like to hear how you upgrade it today and where it hurts.