Three-Way Merge for Seed Data Keeps Admin Edits Through Every Upgrade

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 list of countries in a dropdown. Developers call it seed data or reference data, and on day one it’s easy: insert the rows and move on.

Then the second release comes. It adds a permission, renames a plan and fixes a typo in a role’s description. Meanwhile, in every customer’s database, an admin has been busy. One renamed the Editor role to “Content Editor” because that’s what their team calls it. Another took the delete permission away from editors after an accident. A third added a role of their own. Now the upgrade has to change some of those rows, and it has no idea which values anybody touched.

Reference Data on Bootstrapping.org

Three-Way Merge for Seed Data Keeps Admin Edits Through Every Upgrade