Before you begin
If you haven’t already, create your Liquibase Hub account.
Download and extract Liquibase
Download Liquibase. On the download page, check the “Send me a trial license key for Liquibase Pro” box to get a license key for advanced features and support. You’ll receive an email with a license key.
Extract the Liquibase files you downloaded.
Open a command prompt to view your new directory:
$ cd liquibase-4.2.2
Configure Liquibase
Create a liquibase.properties text file to specify your driver class path, URL, and user authentication information for the database you want to capture.
You’ll also put your Liquibase Pro license key and your Liquibase Hub API key in this file.
Here’s an example an example of a properties file for a PostgreSQL database:
changeLogFile:dbchangelog.xml url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/mydatabase username: postgres password: password classpath: postgresql-42.2.8.jar liquibaseProLicenseKey: licensekey liquibase.hub.ApiKey: APIkey
Take a snapshot of your existing database
Capture the current state of your database by creating a deployable Liquibase changelog.
liquibase --changeLogFile=mydatabase_changelog.xml generateChangeLog
You’ll get a changelog for your database that looks something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <databaseChangeLog xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:pro="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-4.2.xsd http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro/liquibase-pro-4.2.xsd"> <changeSet author="lb-generated" id="1185214997195-1"> <createTable name="BONUS"> <column name="NAME" type="VARCHAR2(15)"/> <column name="JOB" type="VARCHAR2(255)"/> <column name="SAL" type="NUMBER(255)"/> </createTable> </changeSet> <changeSet author="lb-generated" id="1185214997195-2"> <createTable name="DEPT"> <column name="DEPTNO" type="INTEGER"/> <column name="DNAME" type="VARCHAR2(15)"/> <column name="LOC" type="VARCHAR2(255)"/> </createTable> </changeSet> <changeSet author="lb-generated" id="1185214997195-3"> <createView fullDefinition="false" viewName="myView2">SELECT "DEPT".DEPTNO, "DEPT".DNAME FROM "DEPT";</createView> </changeSet> <changeSet author="lb-generated" id="1185214997195-4"> <pro:createFunction functionName="myFunction" path="objects/function/myFunction.sql" relativeToChangelogFile="true"/> </changeSet> </databaseChangeLog>
Create your first database schema change
Now you can start to make database changes by creating your first changeset in your dbchangelog.xml changelog like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <databaseChangeLog xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:pro="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-4.2.xsd http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro/liquibase-pro-4.2.xsd"> <changeSet author="BobR" id="myIDNumber123"> <createTable tableName="actor"> <column autoIncrement="true" name="id" type="INTEGER"> <constraints nullable="false" primaryKey="true" primaryKeyName="actor_pkey"/> </column> <column name="firstname" type="VARCHAR(255)"/> <column name="lastname" type="VARCHAR(255)"/> <column name="twitter" type="VARCHAR(15)"/> </createTable> </changeSet> </databaseChangeLog>
Register your changelog
Register your changelog with the following command so you can view details in Liquibase Hub.
liquibase-4.2.2$ liquibase registerChangeLog
Deploy your change
Now you can deploy your database change by running the update command like this:
liquibase-4.2.2$ liquibase update
If all went well, you’ll see the following output:
Liquibase: Update has been successful.
Now you can automatically roll back your database last change by running the Liquibase rollback command like this:
liquibase-4.2.2$ liquibase rollbackCount 1
If all went well, you’ll see the following output:
Rolling Back Changeset:dbchangelog.xml::myIDNumber123::BobR
Liquibase: Rollback has been successful.
View your project
Register your changelog with the following command so you can view details in Liquibase Hub.
liquibase-4.2.2$ liquibase registerChangeLog
View your project in Liquibase Hub.
Summary
Here’s what we covered in this quickstart:
- Installing Liquibase and using it on the command line
- Configuring Liquibase so it can talk to your database
- Capturing your existing database schema
- Creating your first database change
- Executing your database change
- Rolling back a change
- Viewing your changes on your dashboard in Liquibase Hub
There’s a lot more Liquibase can do!
For starters, you can create database changes with Liquibase using plain SQL, XML, JSON, or YAML. You can also embed Liquibase in your application or in automation.
View our documentation or follow our specific database tutorials for more in-depth information on using Liquibase with your stack.