Install Liquibase with Spring Boot

The purpose of this tutorial is to guide you through the process of using Liquibase as part of your Spring Boot workflow.

The Liquibase Spring Boot integration ensures the application's database is updated along with the application code by embedding your changelog files in your application and automatically running Liquibase update as part of your application startup.

Before you begin

  • Ensure you have Java Development Kit (JDK 17+)

  • If you do not already have a Spring Boot application, you can create one with the Spring Initializer.

Procedure

1

Add the Liquibase dependency

If you did not already add the Liquibase dependency when creating your project, you can add it manually by adding com.liquibase:liquibase-core as a dependency to your project. 

  
<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.liquibase</groupId>
    <artifactId>liquibase-core</artifactId>
    <!-- Springboot already provides a tested Liquibase version, but you can override it to use your preffered version -->
    <version>5.0.0</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

2

Add a Changelog File

Create a changelog file in your project. By default, The Spring Boot Liquibase integration looks for a file named db.changelog-master.xml in the src/main/resources/db/changelog directory.

<?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"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-latest.xsd">

   <changeSet id="1" author="my_name">
      <createTable tableName="test_table">
         <column name="test_id" type="int">
            <constraints primaryKey="true"/>
         </column>
         <column name="test_column" type="INT"/>
      </createTable>
   </changeSet>

</databaseChangeLog>
3

Start your application

When you start your application with mvn spring-boot:run or gradle bootRun, Liquibase will automatically run the changelog file and update your database.

Try it now, and you should see the table test_table created in your database.