Upgrading

This document provides some general tips and tricks that one can use when upgrading an existing, production installation of Patchwork. If you are interested in the specific changes between each release, refer to Release Notes instead. If this is your first time installing Patchwork, refer to the Installation instead.

Before You Start

Before doing anything, always backup your data. This generally means backing up your database, but it might also be a good idea to backup your environment in case you encounter issues during the upgrade process.

While Patchwork won’t explicitly prevent it, it’s generally wise to avoid upgrades spanning multiple releases in one go. An iterative upgrade approach will provide an easier, if slower, upgrade process.

Identify Changed Scripts, Requirements, etc.

Release Notes provides a comprehensive listing of all backwards-incompatible changes that occur between releases of Patchwork. Examples of such changes include:

  • Moved/removed scripts and files

  • Changes to the requirements, e.g. supported Django versions

  • Changes to API that may affect, for example, third-party tools

It is important that you understand these changes and ensure any scripts you may have, such as systemd scripts, are modified accordingly.

Understand What Requirements Have Changed

New versions of Patchwork can often require additional or updated version of dependencies, e.g. newer versions of Django. It is important that you understand these requirements and can fulfil them. This is particularly true for users relying on distro-provided packages, who may have to deal with older versions of a package or may be missing a package altogether (though we try to avoid this). Such changes are usually listed in the Release Notes, but you can also diff the requirements.txt files in each release for comparison.

Collect Static Files

New versions of Patchwork generally contain changes to the additional files like images, CSS and JavaScript. To do this, run the collectstatic management commands:

$ ./manage.py collectstatic

Upgrade Your Database

New versions of Patchwork may provide a number of schema and/or data migrations which must be applied before starting the instance. To do this, run the migrate management command:

$ ./manage.py migrate

For more information on migrations, refer to the Django documentation.