Upgrading

The following guide is intended for users who had installed Broadcast using the Automatic Installation method.

Version-Specific Upgrade Guides

For major version upgrades, please review the version-specific guide for important breaking changes and what to test:

• Upgrading to Broadcast 2.0 - Major release with new UI, widgets, and features

Knowing when an update is out

Broadcast checks for a new version every hour. When one is available, anyone allowed to manage updates sees an Update available notice in the bottom-right corner of the dashboard, with a View update link to the Check for updates page. Dismissing it hides the notice for that version only; the next release brings it back.

To turn the notice off, untick Automatically check for updates on the Check for updates page and click Save.

This stops the hourly check and the notice. It never upgrades anything on its own either way, and the What’s New dialog still fetches release notes after an upgrade.

Before You Upgrade

• Back up your database
• Let running sends finish. Broadcast will not start an upgrade while a broadcast is queueing or sending, or while a background job is part-way through, because the upgrade stops the containers and would cut that work off mid-batch. Work that is only queued does not block an upgrade: it is kept in the database and picked up after the restart. If you click Upgrade now while work is running, the dashboard shows Upgrade not started with what is running (for example, a broadcast that is sending) and changes nothing. Wait for that work to finish, click Back to updates, and try again. Before Broadcast 2.40.0, the dashboard showed nothing in this case

Upgrade Process

To upgrade your Broadcast installation, go to Application and click on Check for updates.

Click on Check for updates once more and the application will check for updates with the central upgrade server.

If an update is available, click on Upgrade now and you will see a popup window asking you to confirm whether you want to begin the upgrade.

The upgrade will take about 5-10 minutes (usually less). During the upgrade, your application will be unavailable for a period of several minutes. This is normal and your system will resume once the upgrade is completed.

After the upgrade: What’s New

The first time you load Broadcast after an upgrade, a What’s new dialog introduces the features that shipped in the versions you skipped: one highlight per screen, each tagged with the version it came from, and some with a screenshot or a link straight to the relevant page.

A few details worth knowing:

• It covers every version between the one you last saw and the one you’re now running, not just the newest, so a jump across several releases still catches you up.
• It shows at most 8 highlights. If more shipped than that, the dialog links to the full changelog rather than making you page through everything.
• Closing it means “seen”: the X, the backdrop, and the Done button all mark those versions as read.
• It does not reopen by itself. Once dismissed, the dialog returns on its own only after a future upgrade brings highlights you haven’t seen.

To see a release’s highlights again, find the release in the Release Notes panel on the right of the Dashboard and click Take a tour of these features under it.

A tour replays one release and does not mark anything as read, so it never hides a newer release you have not seen yet. The link only appears on releases that have highlights you are allowed to see.

Missing it costs you nothing: the same release notes are always on the Check for updates page and in the changelog.

What is happening during the upgrade?

During the upgrade process, the system will:

• Stop the running application
• Download the new version of the application
• Restart the application, performing any database updates

Troubleshooting

If you experience any issues during the upgrade process, feel free to contact us for support.

If the upgrade reports local modifications are blocking script updates, a file that ships with Broadcast has been edited on your server (most often docker-compose.yml). Move your changes into the override file and clear the edits (see Customizing Docker Services for the exact steps) then run the upgrade again.

Here are some steps you can use to manually check your upgrade. You will need to SSH into your server system as root.

# First, check to see what is happening with the application.
# It may still be upgrading as sometimes the upgrade takes
# longer than anticipated.
systemctl status broadcast

# Go to the Broadcast installation directory
cd /opt/broadcast

# Stop the running application
./broadcast.sh stop

# Update the installer code
./broadcast.sh update

# Run the following to clean up any old trigger files
./broadcast.sh trigger

# Manually run the upgrade
./broadcast.sh upgrade

# Restart the application
./broadcast.sh start

Pay attention to any error messages (if any are outputted). If things do not work as expected, forward us the complete output from the above commands.

You can also capture the application’s own logs from inside Broadcast and attach them to your support request, see Monitoring and Logs.