Update a production Sqlite database after publish.

[shaunluttin]

Steps to reproduce

dotnet publish <args> // creates the following directory structure
    
artifacts/
    App.dll
    Database.sqlite
    The-rest-of-the-publish-output
    web.config                
App/
    Migrations/
    Program.cs
    project.json
    Startup.cs

dotnet ef --assembly ..\artifacts\App.dll --startup-assembly ..\artifacts\App.dll database update

The issue

Unexpected value '..\artifacts\App.dll' for option 'assembly'

Further technical details

We have also tried other ways to run dotnet ef database update on the compiled project but have not been able to determine how to update the database.

[rowanmiller]

dotnet ef needs to work on a project, and not assemblies. The --assembly argument (and other arguments) are an implementation detail of how dotnet ef called ef.exe to run the operations. dotnet ef shouldn't even allow you to specify these - and we are going to fix that.

We do have an issue tracking the ability to have commands that work on assemblies, rather than a project - #646. You could look at using ef.exe, but it's not a supported scenario as yet, so you'd be mostly on your own working it out.

We do also have a higher level issue tracking a better story for the scenario of deploying migrations #6313.

For the moment, the best option is probably to use the commands to create a deployment script during build (dotnet ef migrations script --idempotent) and then run the script during deployment.