Generating and using Schema files :: Schema management and migrations :: Core Console Applications :: The Manual :: 1.2 Collection

Generating and using Schema files

A generated schema file allows you to easily transport a database agnostic schema. You can generate a schema file of your database using:
$ cake schema generate
This will generate a schema.php file in you app/config/sql directory.
The schema shell will only process tables for which there are models defined. To force the schema shell to process all the tables, you must add the -f option in the command line.

To later rebuild the database schema from your previously made schema.php file run:
$ cake schema run create
This will drop and create the tables based on the contents of the schema.php.
Schema files can also be used to generate sql dump files. To generate a sql file containing the CREATE TABLE statements, run:

$ cake schema dump filename.sql

Where filename.sql is the desired filename for the sql dump. If you omit filename.sql the sql dump will be output to the console but not written to a file.