One of the things I’ve been trying to do is dig in more deeply to the Flyway command line (CLI) as part of my work with Redgate. While Flyway Desktop is amazing, it’s a wrapper, and my inclination is to ensure I understand the underlying technology.

When I first downloaded Flyway, it wasn’t obvious what needed to be done to connect in different ways, so I decided on a short tutorial that would help me remember how and teach others a few things. This post goes over downloading Flyway and getting started.

Setup

The setup for Flyway is easy. The Community version is free, though there are also Teams and Enterprise editions.

Flyway Community works on many platforms. I’ll choose Windows below.

The Windows version is a zip file. Click this, and it will download.

Then unzip this. I have a c:\Utilities folder where I keep stuff and I’ve added a flyway folder there. I unzip the latest into this folder.

If you care about versioning, you might drop Flyway into a version named folder, but I typically don’t on this machine. For production deployments, I would be more careful.

You then need to add this to your PATH. If you are on Windows 10 or 11, then in the Control Panel (Windows+I), search for environment. Edit the variables for your account.

Once the new dialog appears, find the PATH variable and click Edit.

Now add an entry for the folder where you extracted the Flyway files. For me, this is c:\utilities\flyway.

That’s it, Flyway is installed.

We can check at the command line with “flyway version”.

If you have entered a license key, then you’ll see that message.