If you’re currently running a standard installation of Discourse earlier than v3.1.0.beta7 (or stable earlier than v3.0.6), there is a chance you will be met with this error when attempting to upgrade via the admin UI:
Server Error
while trying to load /admin/docker/repos
Error code: 500 error
Once you’ve run a CLI upgrade, future upgrades via the UI will work fine.
If this has affected you, please let us know in this poll:
This affected my self-hosted forum
0voters
Background
This error is happening because of some recent changes to our .discourse-compatibility file format. Older versions of Discourse are unable to parse compatibility information for plugins which have started using the new format, and therefore throw this error.
Very few plugins have started using the new syntax, so we don’t expect this to be a particularly widespread issue. We’ll keep an eye on things, and update here if there are any developments.
It is not a problem at all, we will happily run the CLI upgrade and everything will be good afterwards. We just wanted to make you aware of the fact that not only UI-based Discourse upgrades are impacted, but also the installation of arbitrary plugins, apparently.