validate

Last published July 28, 2025

The validate command checks your changelog and identifies any possible errors with Liquibase syntax that may cause the update command to fail.

Note: The validate command examines Liquibase syntax and behaviors related to Liquibase operations. It does not check SQL for correctness and does not anticipate database deployment errors resulting from malformed SQL.

Uses

Use the validate command to detect if there are any issues with a changelog before running the update command. Validation helps you avoid a partial update, where only some changesets are applied due to an error in your changelog file.

Use the validate command to ensure:

  • The XML, YAML, JSON, or formatted SQL is structured correctly

  • Referenced files can be found

  • Any attributes you specify in your changelog match the XSD

  • There are no duplicated id, author, and file combinations

  • There are no checksum errors

  • The DATABASECHANGELOG and DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK tables exist (if not, it creates them)

Warning: The validate command only looks for possible errors in the changelog. It does not check for possible errors that might result from applying the changes to a specific database.

Syntax

To run the validate command, specify the driver, classpath, and URL in the Liquibase properties file. You can also specify these properties in your command line.

Then run the validate command:

liquibase validate --changelog-file=example-changelog.xml

* Liquibase will check nested changelogs for definitions of the changesets to validate.

Note: The username and password attributes are not required for connections and systems which use alternate means of authentication. Also, you can specify database credentials as part of the url attribute.

Command parameters

Attribute

Definition

Requirement

--changelog-file=<string>

The root changelog

Required

--url=<string>

The JDBC database connection URL. See Using JDBC URL in Liquibase.

Required

--default-catalog-name=<string>

Name of the default catalog to use for the database connection

Optional

--default-schema-name=<string>

Name of the default schema to use for the database connection. If defaultSchemaName is set, then objects do not have to be fully qualified. This means you can refer to just mytable instead of myschema.mytable.

Note: In the properties file and JAVA_OPTS only: in 4.18.0 and earlier, specify this parameter using the syntax defaultSchemaName. In 4.19.0 and later, use the syntax liquibase.command.defaultSchemaName.

Note: In Liquibase 4.12.0 and later, you can use mixed-case schema names if you set --preserve-schema-case to true. However, in Liquibase 4.12.0–4.22.0, the Liquibase validator still throws a DatabaseException error if you specify a mixed-case value of defaultSchemaName. In 4.23.0 and later, the Liquibase validator accepts any casing.

Optional

--driver=<string>

The JDBC driver class

Optional

--driver-properties-file=<string>

The JDBC driver properties file

Optional

--password=<string>

Password to connect to the target database.

Tip: It is a best practice to store sensitive data in a Secrets Management tool with Liquibase Pro.

Optional

--username=<string>

Username to connect to the target database.

Tip: It is a best practice to store sensitive data in a Secrets Management tool with Liquibase Pro.

Optional

Output

Liquibase Version: 4.9.1 Liquibase Community 4.9.1 by Liquibase No validation errors found. Liquibase command 'validate' was executed successfully.