Placeholders

In addition to regular SQL syntax, Flyway also supports placeholder replacement with configurable prefixes 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.

Placeholders are also provided as additional properties to the database connection, so placeholders reserved by your database (e.g. serverName for SQL Server) will be used by the connection.

Placeholders are supported in versioned migrations, repeatable migrations, and SQL callbacks.

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 script, formatted as ‘yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss’
• ${flyway:filename} = The filename of the current script
• ${flyway:workingDirectory} = The user working directory as defined by the ‘user.dir’ System Property

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