Upgrading Weblate

Docker image upgrades

The official Weblate Docker image (see Installing using Docker) integrates all upgrade steps. Typically, no manual interaction is needed beyond pulling the latest (or at least newer) version.

Generic upgrade instructions

Always look for new changes to Software requirements before upgrading. Once all requirements are installed or upgraded, ensure your settings.py matches the changes in the configuration (consult settings_example.py for correct values).

Always check Version-specific instructions before upgrading. If you are skipping any version(s), be sure to follow instructions for all versions you are skipping during such upgrade. It’s sometimes better to upgrade gradually to an intermediate version to ensure a smooth migration. Upgrading across multiple releases should work, but is not as well tested as single version upgrades!

Note

Always back up the full database before upgrading, so that you can roll back the database if the upgrade fails, see Backing up and moving Weblate.

  1. Stop the WSGI and Celery processes to avoid old processes running while upgrading. Otherwise incompatible changes in the database might occur.

  2. Upgrade Weblate

    For pip installs it can be achieved by:

    uv pip install -U "weblate[all]==version"
    

    Or, if you just want to get the latest released version:

    uv pip install -U "weblate[all]"
    

    If you don’t want to install all of the optional dependencies do:

    uv pip install -U weblate
    

    Using Git checkout, you need to fetch new source code and update your installation:

    cd weblate-src
    git pull
    # Update Weblate inside your virtualenv
    . ~/weblate-env/bin/uv pip install -e '.[all]'
    # Install dependencies directly when not using virtualenv
    uv pip install --upgrade -e .
    # Install optional dependencies directly when not using virtualenv
    uv pip install --upgrade -e '.[all]'
    
  3. New Weblate releases might have new Python dependencies, check if they cover the features you want.

  4. Upgrade the configuration file by following either settings_example.py, or Version-specific instructions.

  5. Upgrade the database:

    weblate migrate --noinput
    
  6. Collect updated static files (see Running server and Serving static files):

    weblate collectstatic --noinput --clear
    
  7. Compress JavaScript and CSS files (optional, see Compressing client assets):

    weblate compress
    
  8. If you are running an installation from Git, you should also regenerate locale files every time you upgrade. You can do this by invoking:

    weblate compilemessages
    
  9. Verify that your setup is sane (see also Production setup):

    weblate check --deploy
    
  10. Restart the Celery worker (see Background tasks using Celery).

Version-specific instructions

Changed in version 5.0: Version specific instructions are now included in the release notes, see Weblate 5.8.4.

Upgrade from an older major version

Upgrades across major versions are not supported. Always upgrade to the latest patch level for the initial major release. Upgrades skipping this step are not supported and will break.

  • If you are upgrading from the 2.x release, always first upgrade to 3.0.1.

  • If you are upgrading from the 3.x release, always first upgrade to 4.0.4.

  • If you are upgrading from the 4.x release, always first upgrade to 5.0.2.

Migrating from other databases to PostgreSQL

If you are not running Weblate with a different database than PostgreSQL, consider migrating to PostgreSQL for better performance by doing the following steps. Remember to stop both, the web and Celery servers beforehand, otherwise you might end up with inconsistent data.

Creating a database in PostgreSQL

It is usually a good idea to run Weblate in a separate database, and a separate user account:

# If PostgreSQL was not installed before, set the main password
sudo -u postgres psql postgres -c "\password postgres"

# Create a database user called "weblate"
sudo -u postgres createuser -D -P weblate

# Create the database "weblate" owned by "weblate"
sudo -u postgres createdb -E UTF8 -O weblate weblate

Migrating to PostgreSQL using pgloader

The pgloader is a generic migration tool to migrate data to PostgreSQL. You can use it to migrate your Weblate database.

  1. Adjust your settings.py to use PostgreSQL as database.

  2. Migrate the schema in the PostgreSQL database:

    weblate migrate
    weblate sqlflush | weblate dbshell
    

3. Run the pgloader to transfer the data. The following script can be used to migrate the database, but you might want to learn more about pgloader to better understand what it does, and tweak it to match your setup:

LOAD DATABASE
     FROM      mysql://weblate:password@localhost/weblate
     INTO postgresql://weblate:password@localhost/weblate

WITH include no drop, truncate, create no tables, create no indexes, no foreign keys, disable triggers, reset sequences, data only

ALTER SCHEMA 'weblate' RENAME TO 'public'
;

Migrating from Pootle

As Weblate was originally written as a replacement for Pootle, it is supported to migrate the user accounts from it. You can dump the users from Pootle and import them using importusers.