Upgrade path for Django 1.4.9 to Django 1.6.0

[Mark Engstrom]

In the past when I have upgraded my Django Projects to a new version of Django I have simply Google'd errors that my project produces and fixed them one at a time and ran my unit tests and did the same.

Is there a better path?

So far I appear to be looking in all the wrong places.

Thanks!

Mark

[James Schneider]

> In the past when I have upgraded my Django Projects to a new version of Django I have simply Google'd errors that my project produces and fixed them one at a time and ran my unit tests and did the same.
>
> Is there a better path?
>
> So far I appear to be looking in all the wrong places.

Start with the release notes for the next major version, and especially check out the deprecation and backwards incompatible changes.

Upgrade one major version at a time. A version control system and virtualenv are your friends in this case. Repeat as necessary.

Your subject line indicates you want to jump from 1.4.X to 1.6.X. Note that 1.6.X is no longer supported, so you'll need to continue on to at least 1.7.X. Since you are on an LTS version now, I would recommend updating to 1.8.X, which is the current LTS version.

Based on the release notes and other announcements, the Django team will be taking more care to have a direct upgrade path recommendation between versions, and will support jumping from one LTS directly to the next. Unfortunately, that isn't really in place for 1.4, but I'm sure plenty of folks have done it and documented their stumbling blocks.

So, as long as you're keeping up with the announcements and release notes, updating your code and tests us the logical next step. The prices should be less painful in the future. I haven't personally experienced much pain between versions, but plenty of folks have and may have better advice.

-James

[Tim Graham]

The docs have some tips (but not much besides what James already offered): https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/upgrade-version/

[Uwe Schuerkamp]

Hi Mark,

I recently had the same issue, I went from 1.3.x to 1.4.21 and then to 1.8.5 via 1.7.x without any major issues. 

Granted my application isn't too complex and doesn't use too many of Django's internal bells and whistles, but the major obstacles for me were adding some new entries to settings.py, creating a new manage.py script and properly escaping / quoting arguements to [% url %}, so nothing that could not be fixed by a bit of googling (the problems I'm having with the testing setup is another matter, though and may be entirely due to me not really knowing what I'm doing ;) 

Cheers, Uwe