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Placeholders

In addition to regular SQL syntax, Flyway also supports placeholder replacement with configurable pre- and suffixes. By default it looks for Ant-style placeholders like ${myplaceholder}. This can be very useful to abstract differences between environments. Changing the value of placeholders will cause repeatable migrations to be re-applied on next migrate.

How to configure

Placeholders can be configured through a number of different ways.

  • Via environment variables. FLYWAY_PLACEHOLDERS_MYPLACEHOLDER=value
  • Via configuration parameters. flyway.placeholders.myplaceholder=value
  • Via the api. .placeholders(Map.of("myplaceholder", "value"))

Placeholders are case insensitive, so a placeholder like ${myplaceholder} can be specified with any of the above techniques.

See parameters for placeholder specific configuration parameters.

Default placeholders

Flyway also provides default placeholders, whose values are automatically populated:

  • ${flyway:defaultSchema} = The default schema for Flyway
  • ${flyway:user} = The user Flyway will use to connect to the database
  • ${flyway:database} = The name of the database from the connection url
  • ${flyway:timestamp} = The time that Flyway parsed the migration, formatted as ‘yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss’

Example

Here is a small example of the supported syntax:

/* Single line comment */
CREATE TABLE test_user (
  name VARCHAR(25) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(name)
);

/*
Multi-line
comment
*/

-- Default placeholders
GRANT SELECT ON SCHEMA ${flyway:defaultSchema} TO ${flyway:user};

-- User defined placeholder
INSERT INTO ${tableName} (name) VALUES ('Mr. T');

Script Config Files