Optimized Development Workflow

WARNING

The original "optimized development workflow" option introduced in Marten 4/5 was completely eliminated in Marten 8.0 (and Wolverine 4.0) in favor of the "Critter Stack" common option shown here.

The original point of Marten was to have a persistence option that mostly got out of your way and let developers just get things done without having to spend a lot of time fiddling with database scripts or ORM configuration. To that end, the default configuration for Marten is optimized for immediate developer productivity:

var store = DocumentStore.For("connection string");

In the configuration above, as needed, behind the scenes Marten is checking the underlying database to see whether the existing database schema matches the in-memory configuration for each document type and the event sourcing, then applying any necessary database migrations at runtime.

That's great at development time! However, the automatic database migrations may be undesirable in production as it requires significant rights from the application to the underlying PostgreSQL database. Additionally, the automatic database migrations require a little bit of in-memory locking in the Marten code that has been problematic for folks using Marten from Blazor.

Marten 9.0

The Roslyn runtime code-generation path was completely removed in Marten 9.0 (PR #4461). The StoreOptions.GeneratedCodeMode, StoreOptions.SourceCodeWritingEnabled, StoreOptions.GeneratedCodeOutputPath, and StoreOptions.AllowRuntimeCodeGeneration properties have been deleted — remove any references to them from your bootstrapping. If you have an Internal/Generated/ folder committed from a pre-9.0 Marten app, delete it and remove it from .gitignore — nothing reads or writes those files anymore. CritterStackDefaults still controls the ResourceAutoCreate half of the per-environment workflow, which is the remaining concern this page covers.

To allow for maximum developer productivity while using more efficient production options, use this option in Marten bootstrapping:

TIP

CritterStackDefaults is defined in the shared JasperFx infrastructure that Marten and Wolverine both consume. For the full reference of the per-environment options and how ResourceAutoCreate is resolved from JasperFxOptions, see the JasperFx shared libraries documentation.

using var host = await Host.CreateDefaultBuilder()
    .ConfigureServices(services =>
    {
        services.AddMarten("connection string");

        // In a "Production" environment, we're turning off the
        // automatic database migrations.
        services.CritterStackDefaults(x =>
        {
            x.Production.ResourceAutoCreate = AutoCreate.None;
        });
    }).StartAsync();

The effective behavior per environment is driven entirely by ResourceAutoCreate:

• In Development: StoreOptions.AutoCreateSchemaObjects = AutoCreate.CreateOrUpdate to detect and apply database schema migrations as needed.
• In Production: StoreOptions.AutoCreateSchemaObjects = AutoCreate.None to short-circuit any kind of automatic database change detection and migration at runtime. This is also a minor performance optimization that sidesteps potential locking issues.