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Rolling back schema changes is inherently risky and may result in data loss. Always test rollback procedures in non-production environments and ensure you have complete database backups before proceeding.
The pgschema approach to rollback is to revert your schema file to a previous version and apply the changes using the standard plan/apply workflow. This ensures rollbacks follow the same safety mechanisms as forward migrations.
1

Revert Schema File

Use git to revert your schema file to the previous working version.
# Revert to previous commit (most common case)
git checkout HEAD~1 schema.sql

# Or find and revert to a specific commit
git log --oneline schema.sql
git checkout <commit-hash> schema.sql
This restores your schema file to the state before the problematic migration was applied.
2

Generate Rollback Plan

Create and review a migration plan that will rollback the database to match the reverted schema file.
# Generate rollback plan
pgschema plan --host localhost --db myapp --user postgres --file schema.sql \
  --output-json rollback_plan.json \
  --output-human rollback_plan.txt

# Review the rollback plan carefully
cat rollback_plan.txt
The plan will show exactly what changes pgschema will make to rollback the database to the previous schema state.
3

Execute Rollback

Apply the rollback plan with appropriate safety measures for production environments.
# Execute the rollback
pgschema apply --host localhost --db myapp --user postgres \
  --plan rollback_plan.json \
  --lock-timeout 30s

# Verify rollback success
pgschema dump --host localhost --db myapp --user postgres > post_rollback_state.sql
diff schema.sql post_rollback_state.sql
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