A few months ago I shipped a bad MongoDB migration.

Classic mistake.

I had run 3 migrations.

The third one had a bug.

I only wanted to rollback that migration.

Turns out with migrate-mongo, rollback is mostly:

undo the last applied migration

Which sounds fine until you have:

• multiple deployments
• multiple environments
• teammates deploying too

“Last applied” stops feeling obvious.

I ended up manually undoing DB changes and fixing migration history myself.

Not fun.

That was the moment I realized our migration setup had started breaking down as the project grew.

The stuff I kept wishing existed

After that incident I wrote down all the things I wanted from a migration tool:

• run one migration file
• rollback a specific migration
• preview migrations before running (dry-run)
• avoid concurrent deploys stepping on each other (locking)
• detect edited migrations (checksums)
• a redo command for local development
• TypeScript support without setup pain
• migration history that doesn’t disappear after rollback

None of these felt unusual.

They felt like things you eventually want once your project stops being small.

So I ended up building one.

Meet mongo-migrate-kit

CLI name: mmk

A few examples:

Run pending migrations:

mmk up

Rollback a specific migration:

mmk down migration-name

Preview before touching production:

mmk up --dry-run

Redo during development:

mmk redo

The hard problem: switching tools safely

This was the part I cared about most.

Migration tools are easy to adopt on day 1.

They’re painful to switch after 50+ migrations already exist.

I didn’t want people to:

• rerun old migrations
• recreate indexes
• duplicate seed data
• accidentally touch production data

So I added:

mmk import

It reads your existing migrate-mongo changelog and adopts the migration history.

Then:

mmk up

only runs new migrations.

No replaying old history.

No scary production moments.

One thing I intentionally don't support

Imported migrate-mongo migrations are forward-only.

You can’t rollback imported migrations using mmk.

I could have tried to force compatibility, but I didn’t trust it enough to be safe.

Different execution models + database tooling = not something I wanted to gamble with.

So the tool fails loudly instead of pretending everything is reversible.

Curious what other teams are doing

If you're running MongoDB migrations in production:

• What’s your current setup?
• Have you hit similar pain points?
• Are you still happy with migrate-mongo?

Would genuinely love feedback.

Project:

mongo-migrate-kit

Docs/demo:
mongo-migrate-kit.vercel.app

npm:
mongo-migrate-kit