Liquibase Best Practices

This page describes a number of best practices that you can apply on your project.

The most common way to organize your changelogs is by major release. Choose a package in your classpath to store the changelogs, preferably near your database access classes. In this example, we will use com/example/db/changelog

com
  example
    db
      changelog
        db.changelog-master.xml
        db.changelog-1.0.xml
        db.changelog-1.1.xml
        db.changelog-2.0.xml
      DatabasePool.java
      AbstractDAO.java

The master.xml includes the changelog for the releases in the correct order. In the example above it could look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<databaseChangeLog 
  xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9" 
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.9
                      http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-1.9.xsd"> 

  <include file="com/example/db/changelog/db.changelog-1.0.xml"/> 
  <include file="com/example/db/changelog/db.changelog-1.1.xml"/> 
  <include file="com/example/db/changelog/db.changelog-2.0.xml"/> 
</databaseChangeLog> 

The db.changelog-master.xml is the changelog you pass to all Liquibase calls.

Choose what works for you. Some use a sequence number starting from 1 and unique within the changelog, some choose a descriptive name (e.g. 'new-address-table').

1. Using his favorite IDE or XML editor, create a new local changeSet containing the change;
2. Run Liquibase to execute the new changeSet (this tests the SQL code);
3. Perform the corresponding changes in the application code (e.g., Java code);
4. Test the new application code together with the database change;
5. Commit both the changeSet and the application code.