Upgrading Weblate

Docker image upgrades

The official Docker image (see Installing using Docker) has all upgrade steps integrated. There are no manual step besides pulling latest version.

Generic upgrade instructions

Before upgrading, please check the current Software requirements as they might have changed. Once all requirements are installed or updated, please adjust your settings.py to match changes in the configuration (consult settings_example.py for correct values).

Always check Version specific instructions before upgrade. In case you are skipping some versions, please follow instructions for all versions you are skipping in the upgrade. Sometimes it’s better to upgrade to some intermediate version to ensure a smooth migration. Upgrading across multiple releases should work, but is not as well tested as single version upgrades.

Note

It is recommended to perform a full database backup prior to upgrade so that you can roll back the database in case upgrade fails, see Backing up and moving Weblate.

  1. Stop wsgi and Celery processes. The upgrade can perform incompatible changes in the database, so it is always safer to avoid old processes running while upgrading.

  2. Upgrade Weblate code.

    For pip installs it can be achieved by:

    pip install -U Weblate
    

    With 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/pip install -e .
    # Install dependencies directly when not using virtualenv
    pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt
    
  3. Upgrade configuration file, refer to settings_example.py or Version specific instructions for needed steps.

  4. Upgrade database structure:

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

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

    weblate compress
    
  7. If you are running version from Git, you should also regenerate locale files every time you are upgrading. You can do this by invoking:

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

    weblate check --deploy
    
  9. Restart celery worker (see Background tasks using Celery).

Version specific instructions

Upgrade from 2.x

If you are upgrading from 2.x release, always first upgrade to 3.0.1 and then continue upgrading in the 3.x series. Upgrades skipping this step are not supported and will break.

Upgrade from 3.x

If you are upgrading from 3.x release, always first upgrade to 4.0.4 or 4.1.1 and then continue upgrading in the 4.x series. Upgrades skipping this step are not supported and will break.

Upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1

Please follow Generic upgrade instructions in order to perform update.

Notable configuration or dependencies changes:

  • There are several changes in settings_example.py, most notable middleware changes, please adjust your settings accordingly.

  • There are new file formats, you might want to include them in case you modified the WEBLATE_FORMATS.

  • There are new quality checks, you might want to include them in case you modified the CHECK_LIST.

  • There is change in DEFAULT_THROTTLE_CLASSES setting to allow reporting of rate limiting in the API.

  • There are some new and updated requirements.

  • There is a change in INSTALLED_APPS.

  • The DeepL machine translation now defaults to v2 API, you might need to adjust MT_DEEPL_API_VERSION in case your current DeepL subscription does not support that.

Upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2

Please follow Generic upgrade instructions in order to perform update.

Notable configuration or dependencies changes:

  • Upgrade from 3.x releases is not longer supported, please upgrade to 4.0 or 4.1 first.

  • There are some new and updated requirements.

  • There are several changes in settings_example.py, most notable new middleware and changed application ordering.

  • The keys for JSON based formats no longer include leading dot. The strings are adjusted during the database migration, but external components might need adjustment in case you rely on keys in exports or API.

  • The Celery configuration was changed to no longer use memory queue. Please adjust your startup scripts and CELERY_TASK_ROUTES setting.

  • The Weblate domain is now configured in the settings, see SITE_DOMAIN (or WEBLATE_SITE_DOMAIN). You will have to configure it before running Weblate.

  • The username and email fields on user database now should be case insensitive unique. It was mistakenly not enforced with PostgreSQL.

Upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3

Please follow Generic upgrade instructions in order to perform update.

Notable configuration or dependencies changes:

  • There are some changes in quality checks, you might want to include them in case you modified the CHECK_LIST.

  • The source language attribute was moved from project to a component what is exposed in the API. You will need to update Weblate Client in case you are using it.

  • The database migration to 4.3 might take long depending on number of strings you are translating (expect around one hour of migration time per 100,000 source strings).

  • There is a change in INSTALLED_APPS.

  • There is a new setting SESSION_COOKIE_AGE_AUTHENTICATED which complements SESSION_COOKIE_AGE.

  • In case you were using hub or lab to integrate with GitHub or GitLab, you will need to reconfigure this, see GITHUB_CREDENTIALS and GITLAB_CREDENTIALS.

  • Changed in 4.3.1: The Celery configuration was changed to add memory queue. Please adjust your startup scripts and CELERY_TASK_ROUTES setting.

  • Changed in 4.3.2: The post_update method of addons now takes extra skip_push parameter.

Upgrade from 4.3 to 4.4

Please follow Generic upgrade instructions in order to perform update.

Notable configuration or dependencies changes:

  • There is a change in INSTALLED_APPS, weblate.configuration has to be added there.

  • Django 3.1 is now required.

  • In case you are using MySQL or MariaDB, the minimal required versions have increased, see MySQL and MariaDB.

  • Changed in 4.4.1: Monolingual gettext now uses both msgid and msgctxt when present. This will change IDs of translation strings in such files. Please make sure you commit pending changes in such files prior upgrading and it is recommeded to force loading of affected component using loadpo.

  • Changed in 4.4.1: Increased minimal required version of translate-toolkit to address several file format issues.

Upgrade from 4.4 to 4.5

Please follow Generic upgrade instructions in order to perform update.

Notable configuration or dependencies changes:

  • The migration might take considerable time if you had big glossaries.

  • Glossaries are now stored as regular components.

  • The glossary API is removed, use regular translation API to access glossaries.

  • There is a change in INSTALLED_APPS - weblate.metrics should be added.

Upgrading from Python 2 to Python 3

Weblate no longer supports Python older than 3.5. In case you are still running on older version, please perform migration to Python 3 first on existing version and upgrade later. See Upgrading from Python 2 to Python 3 in the Weblate 3.11.1 documentation.

Migrating from other databases to PostgreSQL

If you are running Weblate on other dabatase than PostgreSQL, you should migrate to PostgreSQL as that will be the only supported database backend in the 4.0 release. The following steps will guide you in migrating your data between the databases. Please remember to stop both web and Celery servers prior to the migration, 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 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 -O weblate weblate

Migrating using Django JSON dumps

The simplest approach for migration is to utilize Django JSON dumps. This works well for smaller installations. On bigger sites you might want to use pgloader instead, see Migrating to PostgreSQL using pgloader.

  1. Add PostgreSQL as additional database connection to the settings.py:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        # Database engine
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
        # Database name
        "NAME": "weblate",
        # Database user
        "USER": "weblate",
        # Database password
        "PASSWORD": "password",
        # Set to empty string for localhost
        "HOST": "database.example.com",
        # Set to empty string for default
        "PORT": "",
        # Additional database options
        "OPTIONS": {
            # In case of using an older MySQL server, which has MyISAM as a default storage
            # 'init_command': 'SET storage_engine=INNODB',
            # Uncomment for MySQL older than 5.7:
            # 'init_command': "SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLES'",
            # If your server supports it, see the Unicode issues above
            "charset": "utf8mb4",
            # Change connection timeout in case you get MySQL gone away error:
            "connect_timeout": 28800,
        },
    },
    "postgresql": {
        # Database engine
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql",
        # Database name
        "NAME": "weblate",
        # Database user
        "USER": "weblate",
        # Database password
        "PASSWORD": "password",
        # Set to empty string for localhost
        "HOST": "database.example.com",
        # Set to empty string for default
        "PORT": "",
    },
}
  1. Run migrations and drop any data inserted into the tables:

weblate migrate --database=postgresql
weblate sqlflush --database=postgresql | weblate dbshell --database=postgresql
  1. Dump legacy database and import to PostgreSQL

weblate dumpdata --all --output weblate.json
weblate loaddata weblate.json --database=postgresql
  1. Adjust DATABASES to use just PostgreSQL database as default, remove legacy connection.

Weblate should be now ready to run from the PostgreSQL database.

Migrating to PostgreSQL using pgloader

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

  1. Adjust your settings.py to use PostgreSQL as a 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 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 replacement from Pootle, it is supported to migrate user accounts from Pootle. You can dump the users from Pootle and import them using importusers.