Connect Liquibase with Amazon Redshift

Last updated: July 14, 2025

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. An Amazon Redshift data warehouse is a collection of computing resources called nodes. The nodes are organized into a group called a cluster. Each cluster runs an Amazon Redshift engine and contains one or more databases. For more information, see the Amazon Redshift documentation page.

Verified database versions

Cloud

Download JDBC driver

Download extension JAR

Before you begin

Install Liquibase.
Ensure you have Java installed. Liquibase requires Java to run. If you used the Liquibase Installer, Java is included automatically. Otherwise, you must install Java manually.

Procedure

Install drivers

You need additional files to use Liquibase with this database. Use the buttons above to navigate to the required downloads and extract them to your Liquibase /lib folder.

If you prefer, you can use environment variables to point to the directory where Liquibase is installed on your machine. You can set environment variables using your operating system's shell. The location of $LIQUIBASE_HOME will depend on where Liquibase was installed on your machine.

Note for Maven users: If you're running Liquibase using the Maven plugin using mvn liquibase: update, installing the extension with Maven ensures the right files are available and everything works together automatically. You can manage these extensions by adding them as dependencies in your project’s pom.xml file. Configuring Maven this way ensures that the necessary JAR files are retrieved from Maven Central during the build phase.

Configure your connection

Ensure your database is configured. You can check the connection to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
Specify the database URL in the liquibase.properties file (defaults file), along with other properties you want to set a default value for. Liquibase does not parse the URL. You can either specify the full database connection string or specify the URL using your database's standard connection format:

url: jdbc:redshift://endpoint:port/database

Example: url: jdbc:redshift://<cluster-identifier>.us-east-1.redshift.amazonaws.com:5439/databasename

Note: To get your JDBC connection, see Finding your cluster connection string.

Tip: To apply a Liquibase Pro key to your project, add the following property to the Liquibase properties file: licenseKey: <paste code here>

Test your connection

1. Create a text file called changelog (.sql, .yaml, .json, or .xml) in your project directory and add a changeset.

If you already created a changelog using the init project command, you can use that instead of creating a new file. When adding onto an existing changelog, be sure to only add the changeset and to not duplicate the changelog header.

--liquibase formatted sql
--changeset your.name:1
CREATE TABLE test_table (
  test_id INT NOT NULL,
  test_column INT,
  PRIMARY KEY (test_id) NOT ENFORCED
)

--liquibase formatted sql
--changeset your.name:1
CREATE TABLE test_table (
  test_id INT NOT NULL,
  test_column INT,
  PRIMARY KEY (test_id) NOT ENFORCED
)

2. Navigate to your project folder in the CLI and run the Liquibase status command to see whether the connection is successful:

liquibase status --username=test --password=test --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>

Note: You can specify arguments in the CLI or keep them in the Liquibase properties file.

If your connection is successful, you'll see a message like this:

4 changesets have not been applied to <your_connection_url> Liquibase command 'status' was executed successfully.

3. Inspect the deployment SQL with the update-sql command

liquibase update-sql --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>

If the SQL that Liquibase generates isn't what you expect, you should review your changelog file and make any necessary adjustments.

4. Then execute these changes to your database with the update command:

liquibase update --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>

If your update is successful, Liquibase runs each changeset and displays a summary message ending with:

Liquibase: Update has been successful. Liquibase command 'update' was executed successfully.

5. From a database UI tool, ensure that your database contains the test_table object you added along with the DATABASECHANGELOG table and DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table.