liquibase status: Pending Changesets in CI

liquibase status reports how many changesets in the changelog have not yet run against the target database.

status is the read-only preview of update. Run it to see what a deploy would change, or to gate a pipeline on there being (or not being) pending work.

What it does

liquibase status counts and, with --verbose, lists the changesets that have not been applied. It reads DATABASECHANGELOG and the changelog but makes no changes to the schema.

Common usage

Terminal

liquibase \
  --changelog-file=db/changelog.xml \
  --url=jdbc:postgresql://db:5432/app \
  --username=ci --password="$DB_PASSWORD" \
  status --verbose

Options

Flag	What it does
--verbose	List each pending changeset, not just the count
--changelog-file=<path>	Changelog to compare against
--contexts / --labels	Restrict which changesets are considered
--url / --username / --password	Connection details

In CI

status --verbose output is human-oriented; parse it in a pre-deploy job to warn on unexpected pending changesets. It touches nothing, so it is safe in read-only stages. Related commands liquibase updateSQL and liquibase validate give more machine-friendly checks.

Common errors in CI

"Unexpected error running Liquibase: ... Connection could not be created" means bad url or credentials or an unreachable database. "changelog-file ... does not exist" means the path is wrong relative to the CI working directory. status never locks the database, so lock errors here point at a stuck run of a different command.