Command-line

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.

Flyway Pipelines

Flyway Pipelines can be used in conjunction with the Flyway CLI to give you a centralized view of deployment status, history and health metrics for every database deployment you and your team make.

Access Flyway Pipelines at Welcome to Flyway (red-gate.com).

Download and installation

Windows

flyway-commandline-11.0.0-windows-x64.zip

md5 sha1

Extract the archive and simply add the new flyway-11.0.0 directory to the PATH to make the flyway command available from anywhere on your system.

macOS

flyway-commandline-11.0.0-macosx-x64.tar.gz

md5 sha1

Linux

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

$ wget -qO- https://download.red-gate.com/maven/release/com/redgate/flyway/flyway-commandline/11.0.0/flyway-commandline-11.0.0-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar -xvz && sudo ln -s `pwd`/flyway-11.0.0/flyway /usr/local/bin 

Or simply download the archive:

flyway-commandline-11.0.0-linux-x64.tar.gz

md5 sha1

Docker

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

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "docker run --rm redgate/flyway:11.0.0 $*" > /usr/local/bin/flyway && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/flyway'

(All platforms) Or simply download the image:

> docker pull redgate/flyway:11.0.0

Go to Docker Hub for detailed usage instructions.

Directory structure

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

flyway
    conf/       Configuration file(s)
    drivers/    JDBC Drivers
    jre/
    lib/
    licenses/
    sql/        SQL migrations
    flyway      macOS/Linux executable
    flyway.cmd  Windows executable

Usage

> flyway [options] command

Command Line flags

The following flags provide helpful information without carrying out any other operations:

The following flags modify the console output

Commands

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 find out more in the Configuration section of the documents

• Configuration files
• Environment variables

Command-line Arguments

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

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

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"'

Commandline Namespacing

Flyway commandline arguments follow the same namespacing as the configuration files, with the flyway part assumed. For example, the flyway.url configuration parameter can be set on the commandline as flyway -url=jdbc://xxx. To avoid conflicts, many plugins and extensions use a different namespace, such as flyway.init or flyway.diff. When configuring these, there are two options;

Option 1: Use the full namespace on the commandline:

flyway init -init.databaseType=sqlserver 

Option 2: Use scoped namespacing:

When the namespace is the same as the verb, you can configure parameters for that verb directly following that verb and have the namespace assumed;

flyway init -databaseType=sqlserver 

this will be interpreted as flyway.init.databaseType=sqlserver. When using scoped namespacing, you must have the parameters follow the verb and proceeding other verbs.

This will fail, as the info verb is not expecting the databaseType parameter:

flyway init info -databaseType=sqlserver 

to allow for this to work, you have to ensure a logical order; for the above, either of the following would work;

flyway info init -databaseType=sqlserver 

flyway init -databaseType=sqlserver info 

In both cases, the databaseType comes after the init verb and before any other verb, so it is assumed to be `flyway.init.databaseType=sqlserver

Backwards Compatibility:

Scoped namespacing is automatically disabled when ANY namespace is used. This is to maintain backwards compatibility with scripts written for older versions of Flyway. To clarify, the following two examples will work;

flyway init -databaseType=sqlserver -projectName=myProject

flyway init -init.databaseType=sqlserver -init.projectName=myProject 

but the following will not;

flyway init -init.databaseType=sqlserver -projectName=myProject 

because the databaseType parameter is namespaced, scoped namespacing is disabled and thus projectName is assumed to be flyway.projectName and not flyway.init.projectName.

Configuration from standard input

See Configuration from Standard Input

Overriding order

See CLI Configuration Order for details of the configuration mechanism priority.

Credentials

If you do not supply a database user or password via any of the means above, you may be prompted to enter them (depending on the database):

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 pass custom arguments to Flyway's JVM, you can do so by setting the JAVA_ARGS environment variable, either at runtime or persistently on the host system. They will then automatically be taken into account when launching Flyway. This is particularly useful when needing to set JVM system properties.

Runtime example (Windows cmd)

> set JAVA_ARGS=-Xms308M -Xmx432M

The corresponding system environment variable would be Name: JAVA_ARGS Value: -Xms308M -Xmx432M

See Oracle's documentation for a full list of available JAVA_ARGS.

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 (including Log4j v1)
• SLF4J org.slf4j.Logger
• Log4J v2 org.apache.logging.log4j.Logger

Alternatively, you can use the loggers configuration parameter to specify an exact desired logging framework to use.

The simplest way to make use of Flyway's automatic detection 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 v2 with the Flyway command line, you would achieve this by placing the log4j JAR files and the corresponding configuration file log4j2.xml like this:

 flyway-11.0.0
   conf
   drivers
   jre
   lib
     log4j-api-2.17.1.jar        log4j v2 jar
     log4j-core-2.17.1.jar       log4j v2 jar
   licenses
   sql
   log4j2.xml                    log4j configuration

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

 flyway-11.0.0
   conf
   drivers
   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 as it will automatically detect one of these frameworks.

P6Spy

P6Spy is another approach to logging which operates at the driver or datasource level, and Flyway has integration with this. You can read about setting it up here and configuring it here.

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"

Writing to a file

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

Open Source Flyway

This project is a core part of Flyway and you can find more information about it in Flyway Open Source