severe glacier
Hi, I am trying to upgrade version 1.29.2 from 1.16.0. I know it is a huge change and there are a lot of breaking changes. Is there any tips or best practices to follow when upgrading?
For example, I'm planning to use the backstage upgrade helper, but do you recommend upgrading 1 version at a time and make required changes from change log and move on to next version? Or is it recommended to just run yarn backstage-cli versions:bump to jump straight to the latest version?
Thanks in advance!
quick quarry
Hi @severe glacier, it's terribly important to stay up to date with each monthly release. Sadly in your case - you are more than a year behind - it might be better to start from scratch and slowly port over any customizations that you have made.
Once you are on the latest verison I would say setting up automation to do the version bump and running your CI would be the next step. This helps reduce the friction of upgrades and you are more likely to keep up with them. If you use GitHub the Demo site has a workflow that does this, that you can just copy and use: https://github.com/backstage/demo/blob/master/.github/workflows/version-bump.yml
The general recommendation is to not fall more than 3 minor versions behind.
Hope that helps?
severe glacier
Ah that helps, thank you so much!
quick quarry
You're welcome!
There's three major changes to call out - we moved to what we call the new backend system, we've introduced a new auth system so that Backstage is "secure by default", and we moved the vast majority of the plugins to their own repo and NPM Org. Tying to work though all of that will be pretty challenging now matter what upgrade path your take - one version at a time or straight to latest.
Another recommendation it to read the release notes and changelogs as those will have a lot of helpful information:
Example of the release notes for the latest version: https://backstage.io/docs/releases/v1.29.0
Example of the changelog for the latest version: https://github.com/backstage/backstage/blob/master/docs/releases/v1.29.0-changelog.md