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Resolving alembic merge branch conflicts

Alembic is a database migration tool for use with Python, letting you run migrations for schema updates - similar to `rake db:migrate` in Rails.

One common issue is when writing migrations in different git branches, you may get an error like:


FAILED: Multiple head revisions are present for given argument 'head'; please
specify a specific target revision, '@head' to narrow to a specific
head, or 'heads' for all heads

This basically means that you have more than one migration file which points to the same down_revision. That is, when you look at your migration file you should see some lines like the following, and there are multiple files with '4a4614932e00':


revision = '58f4a1203e80'
down_revision = '4a4614932e00'

Thankfully it's an easy enough fix.

To automatically merge all heads, just run:


$ alembic merge heads

If you would like more control to merge specific heads together, run:


$ alembic merge -m "merge ae1 and 27c" ae1027 27c6a

For more info, check out the alembic documentation.

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