Capsul has a ["hub and spoke" architecture](./architecture.md). The "Hub" runs the web application and talks to the Postgres database, while the "Spoke"s are responsible for creating/managing virtual machines. One instance of the capsul-flask application can run in both hub mode and spoke mode at the same time, however there must only be one instance of the app running in "Hub" mode at any given time.
capsul-flask has a concept of a schema version. When the application starts, it will query the database for a table named `schemaversion` that has one row and one column (`version`). If the `version` it finds is not equal to the `desiredSchemaVersion` variable set in `db.py`, it will run migration scripts from the `schema_migrations` folder one by one until the `schemaversion` table shows the correct version.
For example, the script named `02_up_xyz.sql` should contain code that migrates the database from schema version 1 to schema version 2. Likewise, the script `02_down_xyz.sql` should contain code that migrates from schema version 2 back to schema version 1.
**IMPORTANT: if you need to make changes to the schema, make a NEW schema version. DO NOT EDIT the existing schema versions.**
In general, for safety, schema version upgrades should not delete data. Schema version downgrades will simply throw an error and exit for now.