Upgrade Guide

SwiftChat follows semantic versioning. Minor versions are safe rolling upgrades; major versions may require a maintenance window.

Before you upgrade

• Read the Release Notes for breaking changes
• Take a fresh backup — Backup Management → Backup now
• Verify staging matches production version
• Schedule a maintenance window for major upgrades

Rolling upgrade (minor / patch)

git pull
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d --remove-orphans
docker compose exec app npm run migrate

Zero downtime — the reverse proxy drains connections and the new container takes over once its readiness probe passes.

Major upgrade

1. Announce the maintenance window inside SwiftChat (Super Admin → Announcements)
2. Enable maintenance mode (Settings → Advanced)
3. Take a full backup
4. Follow the version-specific migration steps in the release notes
5. Run npm run migrate and npm run verify:upgrade
6. Disable maintenance mode
7. Watch Monitoring Center for 30 minutes

Rollback

If a check fails post-upgrade:

docker compose down
git checkout <previous-tag>
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d
# restore DB from the pre-upgrade snapshot