til/postgres/dump-the-sql-needed-recreate-a-table.md

Dump The SQL Needed To Recreate A Table

The pg_dump command and its arsenal of flags can do a lot of things. This includes producing the set of DDL SQL commands needed to recreate a table and all of it sequences, constraints, and indexes.

The primary flags to know about for this scenario are -t (which lets you specify a table) and --schema-only (which indicates that we want to exclude data from the data).

$ pg_dump -t 'users' --schema-only my_database > users.schema.sql

Run a command like to create a file users.schema.sql that will contain a series of SQL commands that will:

• create the table with its columns (including defaults, not null constraints, etc.)
• create and set the sequence on a serial ID column
• add any foreign key constraints
• create any indexes

Then if you're ever wanting to recreate this table, you can hand that file directly to pg_restore. Or, since it is in SQL, you can run those commands manually.

There are a ton of flags beyond the two covered here. Read about them in the pg_dump docs pages.