Upgrading Substrate

In general, upgrading Substrate is a matter of running substrate upgrade. If your substrate binary is not writeable, substrate upgrade will produce the URL of the tarball you’ll need to download and untar to get the new substrate binary. You should put this in your PATH, replacing the old version.

After upgrading, you should re-run the bootstrapping and account creation commands. The most thorough upgrade requires that you run the following after replacing the binaries:

1. substrate setup
2. substrate account update --domain <domain> --environment <environment> --quality <quality> for each of your other accounts

As a convenience, substrate account list --format shell will generate all of these commands and put them in the proper order. For the most streamlined workflow, run sh <(substrate account list --format shell --no-apply), review what Terraform plans to do, and then run sh <(substrate account list --auto-approve --format shell) to apply the changes.

See the release notes for version-specific upgrade instructions. They will endeavor to call out which of these steps, and potentially additional steps, are necessary to gain access to new features.

Upgrade compatibility is only guaranteed from one month to the next so it’s important to stay up-to-date. Behavior of upgrading several versions in one step is undefined and may not function properly.