🚦 What does “baseline” mean?

• Imagine you have a database that already has tables and data (created by hand, old scripts, or another tool).
• Now you want to start using Flyway for migrations.
• Problem: Flyway sees your DB isn’t empty, but it can’t tell which migrations (if any) were applied → so it refuses to run, because applying V1 could break your database.

✅ What does setting a baseline do?

• It tells Flyway:

  “Start tracking from this version number, and skip earlier migrations.”

• Flyway will not run scripts before the baseline, because it assumes your existing schema already includes them.

🔨 How do you use it?

Add this to your config:

spring.flyway.baseline-on-migrate=true
spring.flyway.baseline-version=1

This means:

• Flyway will create its flyway_schema_history table.
• It will mark version 1 as already applied.
• It will start running migrations from the next version (V2, V3, etc.).

✅ When you don’t need baseline

• If your schema is empty → Flyway can apply migrations from scratch → baseline is unnecessary.