SQLite Script IF NOT EXISTS (...) - Alternatives

I'm looking for an alternative to the IF-ELSE-Statement as known in MS-SQL for SQLite.

Try searching on stackoverflow first!

I did. I found something like that:

• SQLite 'IF NOT EXISTS' syntax error
• SQLite if statement in WHERE clause
• and so on...

The problem in that cases is that they perform SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE.

I want to alter the schema of an existing database.

Creating a new table is trivial because there is CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "foo" (....);.

But how about adding columns to an existing table?

I want to write a script like:

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM pragma_table_info("<table_name>") WHERE name == "<column_name>")
BEGIN
    ALTER TABLE "<table_name>" ADD "<column_name>" TEXT;
END

This sounds like ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS in SQLite. But this post is out of the year 2010 and I would expect that something has changed in the last 9 years.

I need to do some statements like that using arbitrary queries and statements.

Is there any way to do that in pure SQL or do I have to handle that in application code?