Please see https://alembic.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html for general documentation To create alembic migrations you need to have alembic installed and available in PATH: # pip install alembic $ cd ./ceilometer/storage/sqlalchemy/alembic $ alembic revision -m "migration_description" See Operation Reference https://alembic.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ops.html#ops for a short list of commands