Command-line tool

The Flyway command-line tool is a standalone Flyway distribution. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and it is primarily meant for users who wish to migrate their database from the command-line without having to integrate Flyway into their applications nor having to install a build tool.

Download and installation

Select the platform that you need. Each download contains all editions (community, pro, enterprise) of Flyway.

Windows

md5 sha1

Extract the archive and simply add the new flyway-7.3.0 directory to the PATH to make the flyway command available from anywhere on your system.

macOS

md5 sha1

Linux

Download, extract and install by adding to PATH (requires sudo permissions):

$ wget -qO- https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/flywaydb/flyway-commandline/7.3.0/flyway-commandline-7.3.0-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar xvz && sudo ln -s `pwd`/flyway-7.3.0/flyway /usr/local/bin

Or simply download the archive:

md5 sha1

Docker

(Linux only) Download, extract and install by adding to PATH (requires sudo permissions):

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "docker run --rm flyway/flyway:7.3.0 $*" > /usr/local/bin/flyway && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/flyway'

(All platforms) Or simply download the image:

> docker pull flyway/flyway:7.3.0

Go to Docker Hub for detailed usage instructions.

Older versions, packages without JRE and sources are available from Maven Central

Older Docker images are available from boxfuse/flyway

Directory structure

The Flyway download, once extracted, now becomes a directory with the following structure:

 flyway-7.3.0
   conf
     flyway.conf  configuration file
   drivers         JDBC drivers
   jars            Java-based migrations (as jars)
   jre
   lib
   licenses
   sql             SQL migrations
   flyway         macOS/Linux executable
   flyway.cmd     Windows executable

Usage

> flyway [options] command

Flyway editions

The Flyway Command-line tool distribution ships with all editions of Flyway. It defaults to Flyway Community Edition. It can however easily be configured to run the Flyway Pro or Enterprise Edition instead.

Environment variable

One way to switch between the various Flyway editions is to set the FLYWAY_EDITION environment variable prior to executing Flyway to any of the following values:

`community`	Select the Flyway Community Edition (default)
`pro`	Select the Flyway Pro Edition
`enterprise`	Select the Flyway Enterprise Edition

Edition-selecting flags

Alternatively Flyway also comes with edition-selecting flags. By default the flyway command will launch whatever edition has been selected with the FLYWAY_EDITION environment variable (defaulting to community). You can however also use edition-selecting flags to force the selection of the edition of your choice and avoid the need to set any environment variable at all:

`-community`	Select the Flyway Community Edition
`-pro`	Select the Flyway Pro Edition
`-enterprise`	Select the Flyway Enterprise Edition

Commands

Name	Description
migrate	Migrates the database
clean	Drops all objects in the configured schemas
info	Prints the details and status information about all the migrations
validate	Validates the applied migrations against the ones available on the classpath
undo Flyway Pro	Undoes the most recently applied versioned migrations
baseline	Baselines an existing database, excluding all migrations up to and including baselineVersion
repair	Repairs the schema history table

JDBC drivers

In order to connect with your database, Flyway needs the appropriate JDBC driver to be available in its drivers directory.

To see if Flyway ships with the JDBC driver for your database, visit the Driver section of the documentation page for your database. For example, here is the Oracle Drivers section.

If Flyway does not ship with the JDBC driver, you will need to download the driver and place it in the drivers directory yourself. Instructions on where to download drivers from are also in the Driver section of the documentation page for each database, under Maven Central coordinates.

Configuration

The Flyway Command-line tool can be configured in a wide variety of ways. You can use config files, environment variables and command-line parameters (except for FLYWAY_EDITION, which is not available in config files and should be used as specified above). These different means of configuration can be combined at will.

Config files

Config files are supported by the Flyway command-line tool. If you are not familiar with them, check out the Flyway config file structure and settings reference first.

Flyway will search for and automatically load the following config files if present:

<install-dir>/conf/flyway.conf
<user-home>/flyway.conf
<current-dir>/flyway.conf

It is also possible to point Flyway at one or more additional config files. This is achieved by supplying the command line parameter -configFiles= as follows:

> flyway -configFiles=path/to/myAlternativeConfig.conf migrate

To pass in multiple files, separate their names with commas:

> flyway -configFiles=path/to/myAlternativeConfig.conf,other.conf migrate

Relative paths are relative to the current working directory.

Alternatively you can also use the FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILES environment variable for this. When set it will take preference over the command-line parameter.

> export FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILES=path/to/myAlternativeConfig.conf,other.conf
> flyway migrate

By default Flyway loads configuration files using UTF-8. To use an alternative encoding, use the command line parameter -configFileEncoding= as follows:

> flyway -configFileEncoding=ISO-8859-1 migrate

Alternatively you can also use the FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILE_ENCODING environment variable for this. When set it will take preference over the command-line parameter.

> export FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILE_ENCODING=ISO-8859-1

Environment Variables

To make it easier to work with cloud and containerized environments, Flyway also supports configuration via environment variables. Check out the Flyway environment variable reference for details.

Command-line Arguments

Finally, Flyway can also be configured by passing arguments directly from the command-line:

> flyway -user=myuser -schemas=schema1,schema2 -placeholders.keyABC=valueXYZ migrate

A note on escaping command-line arguments

Some command-line arguments will need care as specific characters may be interpreted differently depending on the shell you are working in. The url parameter is particularly affected when it contains extra parameters with equals = and ampersands &. For example:

bash, macOS terminal and Windows cmd: use double-quotes:

> flyway info -url="jdbc:snowflake://ab12345.snowflakecomputing.com/?db=demo_db&user=foo"

Powershell: use double-quotes inside single-quotes:

> ./flyway info -url='"jdbc:snowflake://ab12345.snowflakecomputing.com/?db=demo_db&user=foo"'

Configuration from standard input

You can provide configuration options to the standard input of the Flyway command line. Flyway will expect such configuration to be in the same format as a configuration file.

This allows you to compose Flyway with other operations. For instance, you can decrypt a config file containing login credentials and pipe it straight into Flyway.

Examples

Read a single option from echo:

> echo $'flyway.url=jdbc:h2:mem:mydb' | flyway info

Read multiple options from echo, delimited by newlines:

> echo $'flyway.url=jdbc:h2:mem:mydb\nflyway.user=sa' | flyway info

Use cat to read a config file and pipe it directly into Flyway:

> cat flyway.conf | flyway migrate

Use gpg to encrypt a config file, then pipe it into Flyway.

Encrypt the config file:

> gpg -e -r "Your Name" flyway.conf

Decrypt the file and pipe it to Flyway:

> gpg -d -q flyway.conf.gpg | flyway info

Overriding order

The Flyway command-line tool has been carefully designed to load and override configuration in a sensible order.

Settings are loaded in the following order (higher items in the list take precedence over lower ones):

Command-line arguments
Environment variables
Standard input
Custom config files
<current-dir>/flyway.conf
<user-home>/flyway.conf
<install-dir>/conf/flyway.conf
Flyway command-line defaults

The means that if for example flyway.url is both present in a config file and passed as -url= from the command-line, the command-line argument will take precedence and be used.

Credentials

If you do not supply a database user or password via any of the means above, you will be prompted to enter them:

Database user: myuser
Database password:

If you want Flyway to connect to your database without a user or password, you can suppress prompting by adding the -n flag.

There are exceptions, where the credentials are passed in the JDBC URL or where a password-less method of authentication is being used.

Java Arguments

If you need to to pass custom arguments to Flyway’s JVM, you can do so by setting the JAVA_ARGS environment variable. They will then automatically be taken into account when launching Flyway. This is particularly useful when needing to set JVM system properties.

Output

By default, all debug, info and warning output is sent to stdout. All errors are sent to stderr.

Flyway will automatically detect and use any logger class that it finds on its classpath that derives from any of the following:

the Apache Commons Logging framework org.apache.commons.logging.Log
SLF4J org.slf4j.Logger
the Android builtin log android.util.Log

The simplest pattern to achieve this is to put all the necessary jar files in Flyway’s lib folder and any configuration in the FLyway root folder. For example, if you wished to use log4j with the Flyway command line, you would achieve this by placing the log4j jar file log4j-<version>.jar and the corresponding configuration file log4j.xml like this:

 flyway-7.3.0
   conf
   drivers        
   jars           
   jre
   lib
     log4j-2.13.1.jar           log4j jar
   licenses
   sql            
   log4j.xml                    log4j configuration

Similarly, to use Logback add the relevant files like this:

 flyway-7.3.0
   conf
   drivers        
   jars           
   jre
   lib
     logback-classic.1.1.7.jar  Logback jar
     logback-core-1.1.7.jar     Logback jar
     slf4j-api-1.7.21.jar       Logback dependency
   licenses
   sql            
   logback.xml                  Logback configuration

If you are building Flyway into a larger application, this means you do not need to explicitly wire up any logging if you use one of these frameworks.

Colors

By default the output is automatically colorized if stdout is associated with a terminal.

You can override this behavior with the -color option. Possible values:

auto (default) : Colorize output, unless stdout is not associated with a terminal
always : Always colorize output
never : Never colorize output

Debug output

Add -X to the argument list to also print debug output. If this gives you too much information, you can filter it with normal command-line tools, for example:

bash, macOS terminal

> flyway migrate -X | grep -v 'term-to-filter-out'

Powershell

> flyway migrate -X | sls -Pattern 'term-to-filter-out' -NoMatch

Windows cmd

> flyway migrate -X | findstr /v /c:"term-to-filter-out"

Quiet mode

Add -q to the argument list to suppress all output, except for errors and warnings.

JSON

Add -json to the argument list to print JSON instead of human-readable output. Errors are included in the JSON payload instead of being sent to stderr.

Writing to a file

Add -outputFile=/my/output.txt to the argument list to also write output to the specified file.

Command-line: migrate

Command-line tool

Download and installation

Windows

macOS

Linux

Docker

Directory structure

Usage

Flyway editions

Environment variable

Edition-selecting flags

Commands

JDBC drivers

Configuration

Config files

Environment Variables

Command-line Arguments

A note on escaping command-line arguments

Configuration from standard input

Examples

Overriding order

Credentials

Java Arguments

Output

Colors

Debug output

Quiet mode

JSON

Writing to a file

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