How to add a column with not-null constraint in Liquibase

September 15, 2020

Let’s assume we have a running project using liquibase for the schema migrations and we want to add a new column to the user column. Our initial approach could look something like this:


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  databaseChangeLog:
  - changeSet:
      id: add-required-column
      author: thomas
      changes:
        - addColumn:
            tableName: user
            columns:
            - column:
                name: enabled
                type: boolean
                constraints:
                  nullable: false

Unforuntatly this will not work if there are already entries in our table, as the NotNullConstraint will fail immediately and cannot be applied. Instead we need a two step approach:


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  databaseChangeLog:
  - changeSet:
      id: add-required-column
      author: thomas
      changes:
        - addColumn:
            tableName: user
            columns:
            - column:
                  name: enabled
                  type: boolean
        - addNotNullConstraint:
            tableName: user
            columnName: enabled
            defaultNullValue: true

With the defaultNullValue property liquibase will fill up the entries with the given value. We can use other datatypes like String as well.

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