Upgrade from Liquibase OSS to Liquibase Pro with Maven

Last updated: July 14, 2025

This article walks you through the steps of upgrading from Liquibase Open Source (OSS) to Liquibase Pro using Maven. Maven is a build automation tool commonly used for managing Java-based projects and dependencies.

In this guide, you’ll update your project’s pom.xml file to use the Liquibase Pro Maven plugin and ensure that Liquibase Pro functionality is available on your classpath by removing any exclusions of the liquibase-commercial JAR.

Before you begin

A working Maven project that already uses Liquibase OSS.
You need to have applied a valid Liquibase Pro license key.

Procedure

Update the Maven Plugin.

In your pom.xml, replace the OSS plugin with the Pro plugin by changing the artifact details to the liquibase-pro-maven-plugin.

Be sure to replace 5.0.0 with the version of Liquibase you'd like to use.

Example Code

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.liquibase</groupId>
  <artifactId>liquibase-pro-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>5.0.0</version>
</plugin>

Remove Any liquibase-commercial Exclusions

To ensure Liquibase Pro features are available, remove any dependency exclusions that block the liquibase-commercial JAR. This is sometimes added in OSS setups to avoid loading Pro libraries unintentionally.

Look for a block like this in your pom.xml and remove it. You can either remove the <exclusions> section or the entire dependency declaration if it’s redundant.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.liquibase</groupId>
  <artifactId>liquibase-core</artifactId>
  <version>4.33.0</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.liquibase</groupId>
      <artifactId>liquibase-commercial</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>

Verify the Upgrade

To verify that Liquibase Pro is installed and working correctly, run a Liquibase goal from your Maven project directory. You can run the example code in your terminal. This code generates the raw SQL statements that Liquibase would apply to your database, but does not execute them.

Example Code

mvn liquibase:updateSQL

If Liquibase Pro is configured correctly, this command will execute without errors, and you’ll see output indicating that the Liquibase Pro Maven plugin is in use.