What are Liquibase property substitution and how does it work?

Liquibase property substitution allows you to use placeholders in your changeLog files that are replaced with values at runtime. Placeholders follow the syntax ${propertyName}. This makes your changeLogs more portable — table prefixes, schema names, default values, and environment-specific settings can be externalised rather than hardcoded.

Properties can be defined in three ways, in decreasing priority order:

1. Command-line parameter — --changelog-variables=tablePrefix=app_ (highest priority)
2. liquibase.properties file — tablePrefix=app_
3. Inside the changeLog itself using <property> tags (lowest priority)

Declaring a property in the changeLog:

<databaseChangeLog ...>
    <property name="tablePrefix" value="prod_" dbms="postgresql"/>
    <property name="tablePrefix" value="dev_" dbms="h2"/>

    <changeSet id="1" author="kate">
        <createTable tableName="${tablePrefix}customer">
            <column name="id" type="BIGINT"/>
        </createTable>
    </changeSet>
</databaseChangeLog>

The dbms attribute on <property> makes the value database-type-specific — a different prefix for PostgreSQL vs H2 in tests. This is a handy pattern for managing schema name or type differences without duplicating entire changeLogs.

In Spring Boot, you can pass Liquibase-specific properties through:

spring.liquibase.parameters.tablePrefix=app_

Property substitution happens at changeLog parsing time, before any checksum computation. The checksum is computed on the final resolved content, not the template with placeholders.

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