Using Flyway for Database Version Management and Migration in Spring Boot

What is Flyway? What problems does it solve?

Flyway is a database migration tool that executes SQL or Java scripts during application deployment, managing versioned migrations automatically.

PS: Its mechanism is essentially the same as Liquibase.

Flyway migrations

Flyway defines three migration types:

Versioned Migrations : executed once per version, used for creating, altering, or dropping tables and data.

Undo Migrations : reverse operations of versioned migrations (available in the paid version).

Repeatable Migrations : can run multiple times, used for views, stored procedures, functions, etc.

The naming convention is V|U|R__Version__Description.sql (e.g., V1.0__Init_DB.sql ).

Common Flyway commands

Migrate : core workflow that scans for pending migrations and applies them.

Clean : removes all objects in the configured schema (useful for dev/test, not for production).

Info : prints detailed status of all migrations.

Validate : checks that applied migrations match the checksum of the scripts.

Undo : rolls back the last migration (paid feature).

Baseline : creates a metadata table for an existing schema and marks a baseline version.

Repair : repairs the metadata table when it becomes inconsistent.

Simple example

Integrating Flyway with a Spring Boot project requires the following Maven dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
    <version>8.0.28</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.flywaydb</groupId>
    <artifactId>flyway-mysql</artifactId>
    <version>8.5.7</version>
</dependency>

The Spring Boot auto‑configuration already includes Flyway support; you can customize it in application.yml :

spring:
  datasource:
    url: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test_db_flyway?useSSL=false&autoReconnect=true&characterEncoding=utf8
    driver-class-name: com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
    username: root
    password: your_password
  flyway:
    enabled: true
    encoding: UTF-8
    locations: classpath:db/migration
    validate-on-migrate: true

Place migration scripts under src/main/resources/db/migration . Example versioned migrations:

-- V1.0__Init_DB.sql
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `tb_user`;
CREATE TABLE `tb_user` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `user_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
  `password` varchar(45) NOT NULL,
  `email` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  `phone_number` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `description` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `create_time` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `update_time` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=2 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

-- V1.1__Init_Data.sql
LOCK TABLES `tb_user` WRITE;
INSERT INTO `tb_user` VALUES (1,'pdai','dfasdf','[email protected]',1212121213,'afsdfsaf','2021-09-08 17:09:15','2021-09-08 17:09:15');
UNLOCK TABLES;

Running the Spring Boot application produces logs that show Flyway validating and applying the migrations, creating the flyway_schema_history table, and finally reporting successful migration to version 1.1.

Previous highlights (promotional section omitted)

—