Refers to a column an earlier migration in the set dropped or renamed

Critical — this fails outright or takes production down.

What it catches

Migrations apply in order. When file 0003 drops or renames a column and file 0005 still indexes, alters, or constrains the old name, 0005 fails at apply time — after 0003 and 0004 have already run, leaving production between two states no migration describes. Fires only for tables the set itself created, where the column list is known exactly; anything created outside the set is left alone.

Fires on

-- 0003_cleanup.sql
ALTER TABLE orders DROP COLUMN legacy_flag;
-- 0005_index.sql
CREATE INDEX idx_orders_legacy ON orders (legacy_flag);

Do this instead

Reference the column by its current name, or drop the dead statement. If the later migration was written first and the drop came in later, reorder them — the set is checked in apply order.

-- 0005_index.sql, its own migration run outside a transaction:
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY idx_orders_status ON orders (status);

Catch this before it ships

This rule runs in the hosted service on Startup and above — add --remote with a team token, or use the GitHub Action: npx bolvrk check migration.sql

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