Table of Contents
1. Introduction
This article describes key concepts of Flyway and how we can use this framework to continuously remodel our application’s database schema reliably and easily. At the end, we’ll present an example of managing an in-memory H2 database using a Maven Flyway plugin.
Flyway updates a database from one version to a next using migrations. We can write migrations either in SQL with database-specific syntax or in Java for advanced database transformations.
Migrations can either be versioned or repeatable. The former has a unique version and is applied exactly once. The latter does not have a version. Instead, they are (re-)applied every time their checksum changes.
Within a single migration run, repeatable migrations are always applied last, after pending versioned migrations have been executed. Repeatable migrations are applied in order of their description. For a single migration, all statements are run within a single database transaction.
In this article, we mainly focus on how we may use the Maven plugin to perform database migrations.
2. Flyway Maven Plugin
To install a Flyway Maven plugin, let’s add the following plugin definition to our pom.xml:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.flywaydb</groupId>
<artifactId>flyway-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>4.0.3</version>
</plugin>
We can check the latest version of the plugin available at Maven Central.
This Maven plugin may be configured in four different ways. Please refer to the documentation to get a list of all configurable properties.
2.1. Plugin Configuration
We may configure the plugin directly via the <configuration> tag in the plugin definition of our pom.xml:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.flywaydb</groupId>
<artifactId>flyway-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>4.0.3</version>
<configuration>
<user>databaseUser</user>
<password>databasePassword</password>
<schemas>
<schema>schemaName</schema>
</schemas>
...
</configuration>
</plugin>
2.2. Maven Properties
We may also configure the plugin by specifying configurable properties as Maven properties in our pom:
<project>
...
<properties>
<flyway.user>databaseUser</flyway.user>
<flyway.password>databasePassword</flyway.password>
<flyway.schemas>schemaName</flyway.schemas>
...
</properties>
...
</project>
2.3. External Configuration File
We may also provide plugin configuration in a separate .properties file:
flyway.user=databaseUser flyway.password=databasePassword flyway.schemas=schemaName ...
The default configuration file name is flyway.properties and it should reside in the same directory as the pom.xml file. Encoding is specified by flyway.encoding (Default is UTF-8).
If you are using any other name (e.g customConfig.properties) as the configuration file, then it should be specified explicitly when invoking the Maven command:
$ mvn -Dflyway.configFile=customConfig.properties
2.4. System Properties
Finally, all configuration properties may also be specified as system properties when invoking Maven on the command line:
$ mvn -Dflyway.user=databaseUser -Dflyway.password=databasePassword -Dflyway.schemas=schemaName
Following is an order of precedence when a configuration is specified in more than one way:
- System properties
- External configuration file
- Maven properties
- Plugin configuration
3. Example Migration
In this section, we walk through the required steps to migrate a database schema to an in-memory H2 database using the Maven plugin. We use an external file to configure Flyway.
3.1. Update POM
First, let’s add H2 as a dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.h2database</groupId>
<artifactId>h2</artifactId>
<version>1.4.196</version>
</dependency>
We can, again, check the latest version of the driver available on Maven Central. We’d also add the Flyway plugin as explained earlier.
3.2. Configure Flyway Using External File
Next, we create myFlywayConfig.properties in $PROJECT_ROOT with the following content:
flyway.user=databaseUser flyway.password=databasePassword flyway.schemas=app-db flyway.url=jdbc:h2:mem:DATABASE flyway.locations=filesystem:db/migration
The above configuration specifies that our migration scripts are located in the db/migration directory. It connects to an in-memory H2 instance using databaseUser and databasePassword.
The application database schema is app-db.
Of course, we replace flyway.user, flyway.password, and flyway.url with our own database username, database password, and database URL appropriately.
3.3. Define First Migration
Flyway adheres to the following naming convention for migration scripts:
<Prefix><Version>__<Description>.sql
Where:
- <Prefix> – Default prefix is V, which may be configured in the above configuration file using the flyway.sqlMigrationPrefix property.
- <Version> – Migration version number. Major and minor versions may be separated by an underscore. The migration version should always start with 1.
- <Description> – Textual description of the migration. The description needs to be separated from the version numbers with a double underscore.
Example: V1_1_0__my_first_migration.sql
So, let’s create a directory db/migration in $PROJECT_ROOT with a migration script named V1_0__create_employee_schema.sql containing SQL instructions to create the employee table:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `employee` (
`id` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
`name` varchar(20),
`email` varchar(50),
`date_of_birth` timestamp
)ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=UTF8;
3.4. Execute Migrations
Next, we invoke the following Maven command from $PROJECT_ROOT to execute database migrations:
$ mvn clean flyway:migrate -Dflyway.configFile=myFlywayConfig.properties
This should result in our first successful migration.
The database schema should now be depicted as follows:
employee: +----+------+-------+---------------+ | id | name | email | date_of_birth | +----+------+-------+---------------+
We can repeat definition and execution steps to do more migrations.
3.5. Define and Execute Second Migration
Let’s see what a second migration looks like by creating a second migration file with name V2_0_create_department_schema.sql containing the following two queries:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `department` ( `id` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, `name` varchar(20) )ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=UTF8; ALTER TABLE `employee` ADD `dept_id` int AFTER `email`;
We’ll execute a similar migration like we did the first time.
And now, our database schema has changed to add a new column to employee and a new table:
employee: +----+------+-------+---------+---------------+ | id | name | email | dept_id | date_of_birth | +----+------+-------+---------+---------------+
department: +----+------+ | id | name | +----+------+
We may now verify that both migrations were indeed successful by invoking the following Maven command:
$ mvn flyway:info -Dflyway.configFile=myFlywayConfig.properties
4. Disabling Flyway in Spring Boot
Sometimes we may need to disable Flyway migrations under certain circumstances.
For example, it’s a common practice to generate database schema based on the entities during tests. In such a situation, we can disable Flyway under the test profile.
Let’s see how easy it is in Spring Boot.
4.1. Spring Boot 1.x
All we need to do is to set the flyway.enabled property in our application-test.properties file:
flyway.enabled=false
4.2. Spring Boot 2.x
In the more recent versions of Spring Boot, this property has been changed to spring.flyway.enabled:
spring.flyway.enabled=false
4.3 Empty FlywayMigrationStrategy
If we only want to disable automatic Flyway migration on startup, but still be able to trigger the migration manually, then using the properties described above isn’t a good choice.
That’s because in such a situation Spring Boot will not auto-configure the Flyway bean anymore. Consequently, we’d have to provide it on our own which isn’t very convenient.
So if this is our use case, we can leave Flyway enabled and implement an empty FlywayMigrationStrategy:
@Configuration
public class EmptyMigrationStrategyConfig {
@Bean
public FlywayMigrationStrategy flywayMigrationStrategy() {
return flyway -> {
// do nothing
};
}
}
This will effectively disable Flyway migration on application startup.
But we’ll still be able to trigger the migration manually:
@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest
public class ManualFlywayMigrationIntegrationTest {
@Autowired
private Flyway flyway;
@Test
public void skipAutomaticAndTriggerManualFlywayMigration() {
flyway.migrate();
}
}
5. How Flyway Works
To keep track of which migrations have already been applied, when and by whom, it adds a special bookkeeping table to your schema. This metadata table also tracks migration checksums and whether or not the migrations were successful.
The framework performs the following steps to accommodate evolving database schemas:
- It checks a database schema to locate its metadata table (SCHEMA_VERSION by default). If the metadata table does not exist, it will create one
- It scans an application classpath for available migrations
- It compares migrations against the metadata table. If a version number is lower or equal to a version marked as current, it is ignored
- It marks any remaining migrations as pending migrations. These are sorted based on version number and are executed in order
- As each migration is applied, the metadata table is updated accordingly
6. Commands
Flyway supports the following basic commands to manage database migrations.
- Info: Prints current status/version of a database schema. It prints which migrations are pending, which migrations have been applied, what is the status of applied migrations and when they were applied.
- Migrate: Migrates a database schema to the current version. It scans the classpath for available migrations and applies pending migrations.
- Baseline: Baselines an existing database, excluding all migrations, including baselineVersion. Baseline helps to start with Flyway in an existing database. Newer migrations can then be applied normally.
- Validate: Validates current database schema against available migrations.
- Repair: Repairs metadata table.
- Clean: Drops all objects in a configured schema. All database objects are dropped. Of course, you should never use clean on any production database.
7. Conclusion
In this article, we’ve shown how Flyway works and how we can use this framework to remodel our application database reliably.
The code accompanying this article is available on GitHub.
