Introducing Flows in Liquibase Pro

We’re excited to announce that Liquibase Pro users now have access to Flows, modular command files (YAML) that run within the CI/CD pipeline. Flows add an additional way of standardizing best practices, simplifying actions, and improving governance and control for teams.

Here’s what to expect from the liquibase flow command.

What are Flows?

Flows are a streamlined way to create portable, platform-independent Liquibase workflows that run where you and your teams need them, without modification. This includes in Jenkins, GitHub actions, a developer’s desktop, or any other CI/CD deployment tool. Liquibase Flows are made up of Liquibase commands, shell commands (and calls to shell scripts), or even calls to other flows. Flows can be decomposed into multiple linked flow files, so control and governance can be maintained by the appropriate teams. Flows can also leverage environment variables, local and global variables, property substitution, and conditionals to power your custom CI/CD processes.

Why Use Flows?

Liquibase Flows allow your organization to put a multi-step deployment workflow in a single source-controllable file, called a Flow File. Then, all these steps can be run sequentially by invoking a single liquibase flow command within your CI/CD deployment tool. This helps ensure standardized best practices within your organization, while also creating portability of actions between toolchains and environments. Because Flows allow you to perform all your agile, iterative database development from one or more flow files, you can establish the granularity of control of these files needed for security and compliance in a way that’s also repeatable and consistent across teams.

Create Your First Flow

If you’re ready to create consistent implementations through well-governed, automated database change management no matter what tools your team is using, check out our full Liquibase Flow documentation. And to see what Flows look like inside a demo environment, watch the Liquibase Flow tutorial video.