[matheist]

How do the backend devs test changes to the API and to the DB schema? Are they not running versions locally themselves? Can the frontend devs just do whatever the backend devs do?

> The frontend team would need to be instructed to "pull the changes"/"spin up new image".

With a small investment in tooling you can probably get away without asking too much of frontend devs.

Write your "launch local api" script (checked into the frontend repository) to just work without taking any parameters: put the latest docker image tag into version control. If you have a `latest` tag for your image then you don't even need to update the frontend repo, instead you can just always pull the image as part of the launch script. Anyone working on an API dev branch can just replace the image tag (either in the script, or you can provide a flag to override it).

Write your launch script to also start up the database if it's not running. You can check at API startup whether the db version matches the API, and inform the dev if there's a mismatch.