When you’re ready to use Liquibase, the first step whether you have an existing database or are implementing Liquibase while choosing a new database is to create a project. This guide shows you how to create a new Liquibase project using the init project command.

If you already have a working database and want to start managing it with Liquibase, the first step is to generate a changelog that captures the current state of your schema. This allows you to bring Liquibase into your existing project without disrupting your database or rebuilding anything from scratch.

After generating your initial changelog, organizing your changelogs properly is essential to keep your project maintainable as it grows. Follow these steps to set up a root changelog and organize your nested changelogs for scalability and easier collaboration.

Once your changelog structure is set up, you’re ready to start making changes to your database and tracking those changes with Liquibase.

As your Liquibase project grows, you'll likely split your database changes into multiple changelog files for better organization. To deploy all of your changes together, you need to connect your individual changelogs using a root changelog file.

In real-world projects, you’ll often work with several database environments, such as development, testing, staging, and production. Liquibase gives you tools to apply database changes safely and selectively across these environments. This article walks through how to use Liquibase contexts to manage multiple environments.

Even when using changelogs to manage database changes, manual updates can still happen—especially in development. Liquibase allows you to capture these changes by taking a snapshot of your local environment and comparing it to a reference database. This lets you safely review and append new changes to your changelog.

You can use the JSON format snapshot file in the diff and diff-changelog commands.