What is a Liquibase flow?

As organizations strive for faster deployment cycles and improved collaboration, building out automation becomes essential for achieving a successful Liquibase implementation.

By automating repetitive database tasks and streamlining workflows, teams can enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and focus on delivering value to their customers.

Liquibase Secure flow

Liquibase Secure flow makes automating consistent database change management easy, no matter what databases or tools your teams are using. By defining one or more workflows, release teams can enforce standard database management processes and policies independently of database or pipeline vendor.

These YAML-based workflows are known as flow files, or flows. Flow files can contain Liquibase commands, shell commands, and calls to external shell scripts. Flows can even call other flows.

Use the sample flow files to help build your automation framework. These flows include workflows for automating database scenarios such as premerges, deployments, postmerges, and rollbacks. This guide also provides examples for calling Liquibase Secure flows with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.

Keep your flows in one repository

It is best practice to house Liquibase flows in a centralized repository. A centralized repository with read-only access for application development teams helps enforce workflow governance and maintain database deployment consistency across the organization.

Read-only is the part that does the work. If each team can edit the flow it runs, the flow stops being a control and becomes a suggestion, and two teams will have diverged within a quarter without anyone deciding to.