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Upgrades

CourseMaker ships breaking changes infrequently but they do happen. Always read the release notes before pulling.

Standard upgrade​

cd /opt/coursemaker
git fetch --tags
git checkout v<new-version>

docker compose build app
docker compose up -d app

The app entrypoint runs new migrations automatically. Watch the logs:

docker compose logs -f app

If migrations fail, the container exits — see Troubleshooting.

Zero-downtime is not supported​

The container restart takes 5–15 seconds and the page returns 502 during that window. Schedule upgrades for off-peak hours, or front the deployment with a maintenance page in your reverse proxy.

Skipping migrations on rollback​

If a migration breaks something and you need to roll the app back:

git checkout v<previous-version>
docker compose build app
SKIP_MIGRATIONS=1 docker compose up -d app

SKIP_MIGRATIONS=1 keeps the older app from trying to run the new migrations again. It does not undo migrations. Schema changes that the older app cannot understand will still break things — open a support issue rather than guessing.

Postgres major-version upgrade​

The compose file pins postgres:17-alpine. To go to 18:

  1. pg_dump the current DB (see Backups).
  2. docker compose down.
  3. docker volume rm coursemaker_pgdata.
  4. Edit docker-compose.yml, change postgres:17-alpine → postgres:18-alpine.
  5. docker compose up -d postgres, restore the dump, then start app.