What is the update report?

Last updated: July 14, 2025

The update report is a Liquibase operation report that informs you of system, runtime, operation, and changeset information about your database deployments.

In Liquibase 4.25.1 and later, you can automatically generate a database update report using the Liquibase update family of commands: update, update-count, update-one-changeset, and update-to-tag. In Liquibase 4.28.0 and later, you can also generate an update report as part of the update-testing-rollback command.

The update report gives you a human-readable summary of the state of your database and changelogs, any generated SQL for changesets, whether the operation was successful, any error messages, and other useful data.

Uses

Using Liquibase update reports can help developers, DBAs, DevOps engineers, and managers in the following ways:

  • Easily scan and understand the changes made to your database with the summary section, then dive deeper with the execution details.

  • Audit and report on the changes to your database without needing to analyze or interpret logs.

  • Collaborate with your team with shareable reports.

What is the update report?

Examples

Setting parameters

You can modify the update report output with the parameters listed in the tables on this page. In the CLI, global parameters go to the left of the command, and command parameters go to the right of the command.

liquibase \ --reports-enabled=true \ --reports-path=reports \ --reports-name=update_report.html \ update \ --changelog-file="example-changelog.xml"

Note: For readability, this page shows parameters on new lines. If you type in the commands on a single line, do not include the backslashes \ shown in the examples.

You can also set parameters in your liquibase.properties file, as environment variables, or in a flow file. For a list of parameters and their syntax in each format, see What parameters can I use with operation reports?

Disable reports by default; enable only the update report

If you want to keep reports disabled by default and enable only the update report, you can use the command parameter --report-enabled (singular) on an update family command.

Note: The flow file example uses reports-enabled (plural) within globalArgs to enable all operation reports. To enable this specific kind of report, but not other reports, you must instead set report-enabled (singular) in cmdArgs.

liquibase update \
    --report-enabled=true \
    --report-name=my_update_report.html

Parameters

Our What parameters can I use with the operations report? article contains all parameters that you can use for the operations report.