My Discourse installation has fallen out of date (3.2.0.beta4-dev) and I need to upgrade to 3.5. I am worried about disturbing things and use a few plugins/integrations that I haven’t wanted to change (WP Discourse, login through Wordpress with membership info and Category Lockdown plugin) and I have had issues manually upgrading in the past. What’s the best approach to do the upgrade? Should I do some sort of partial upgrade to a different version first? Are there any gotchas I should be aware of?

deploy a test forum. I have never forked anything

If you want to be safest, you’ll spin up a new server, Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync (I’d skip the database files), and restore a backup. I’m pretty sure that you’ll need to PostgreSQL 15 update. There should be no issues with WP Discourse. You can check Discourse Category Lockdown. There’s a pretty good chance you can just follow the PG 15 upgrade and everything will be fine, but you asked about “best practices”.

[image] pfaffman: spin up a new server, Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync (I’d skip the database files), and restore a backup This has some good side-effects, of ensuring you have a recent backup and you have a safe copy of that backup. You do need to do those things, however you approach your upgrade. I get the impression it would be good practice to comment out all your plugins too, but it would be good for someone to confirm that.

[image] Ed_S: This has some good side-effects, of ensuring you have a recent backup and you have a safe copy of that backup. You do need to do those things, however you approach your upgrade. Yeah. Actually, knowing that you can spin up a new server and restore a backup. I had to do this once recently when one of my server’s had a SSD die. I wished that I had actually practiced (though, as it turned out, though I hadn’t explicitly practiced, having gone through the process hundreds of times was enough and it all went as planned). [image] Ed_S: I get the impression it would be good practice to comment out all your plugins too, but it would be good for someone to confirm that. There is no downside, especially since a bunch of plugins got moved to core and there could be something old that’s broken. After the thing is in working order, you can go about restoring whatever plugins you notice are missing.

Best practice? Keep a checklist somewhere, you can add one in the UI>admin>update by adding this CSS to your theme(../admin/customize/themes/ edit>css) if someday you or someone would have the idea to update too quickly : .admin-contents.update .d-nav-submenu::before {content:“Update checklist” : Backup done?" ; “Last month meta announcement read? ; last months most important bugs from Meta checked? Essential plugin compatibility checked? Postgres/Redis compatibility version checked? Right timing for the update checked? Troubleshooting Workforce Availability in case of update failure checked?” }

Checklists are a good idea. For myself, contemplating an upgrade, I wait for a release, wait a couple of days, wait for a weekday, read the Bugs and Support categories to see what problems people are having. And wait for those problems, if any, to be fixed.

[image] Ed_S: I wait for a release You are on stable presumably? Otherwise this strategy wouldn’t help with continuous integration …

[image] merefield: You are on stable presumably? No, I’m on tests-passed. It’s true that my delay of a few days will allow some stray further commits to be added to the repo, but at the same time it allows some mistakes to have been corrected. Almost all commits, of course, are not problematic, so I think it’s a good tradeoff, but opinions may differ.

I remain unconvinced without a supporting graph. :innocent:

Major upgrade -- best practices?

Product Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) August 29, 2025, 2:45pm 10

There is a flurry of upgrades just after a new beta, so even on tests-passed, a few days after an upgrade is a good time for an upgrade. Or, perhaps we share the same flawed logic!

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Major upgrade -- best practices?

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