SQLAlchemy / Alembic: check if table has column

Helper file

We define us a little helper function for this use case:

from alembic import op
from sqlalchemy import engine_from_config
from sqlalchemy.engine import reflection


def table_has_column(table, column):
    config = op.get_context().config
    engine = engine_from_config(
        config.get_section(config.config_ini_section), prefix='sqlalchemy.')
    insp = reflection.Inspector.from_engine(engine)
    has_column = False
    for col in insp.get_columns(table):
        if column not in col['name']:
            continue
        has_column = True
    return has_column

This code we put in a file alembic_helpers.py inside the alembic directory, where the env.py file is.

Using the helper function table_has_column

In the alembic version file for our upgrade step, we use it like this to chekc if a table has a column before we try to drop that column:

from alembic import op
import imp
import os

alembic_helpers = imp.load_source('alembic_helpers', (
    os.getcwd() + '/' + op.get_context().script.dir + '/alembic_helpers.py'))


def upgrade():
    if alembic_helpers.table_has_column('reference', 'sections'):
        op.drop_column('reference', 'sections')