Self-Hosted Releases & Upgrading

Sentry cuts regular releases for self-hosting to keep it as close to sentry.io as possible. We decided to follow a monthly release schedule using the CalVer versioning scheme, with a primary release on the 15th of each month. We don't patch old versions, but if a bug is bad enough we may cut an out-of-cycle point release, which, like our regular monthly releases, is a snapshot of the latest versions of all of our components. You can find the latest release over at the releases section of our self-hosted repository.

Upgrading

We encourage everyone to regularly update their Sentry installations to get the best and the most recent Sentry experience.

Before starting the upgrade, we shut down all the services and then run some data migrations, so expect to have some downtime. There is an experimental --minimize-downtime option to reduce the downtime during upgrades. Use this at your own risk and see the pull request it was implemented in for more information.

We assume you've cloned the self-hosted repository, so checkout the version you want to upgrade to (23.11.0 as an example).

git fetch
git checkout 23.11.0

We may have some updated configuration, especially for new features, so always check the example config files under the sentry directory and see if you need to update your existing configuration. We do our best to automate critical configuration updates, but you should always check your configs during upgrades.

If you have a .env.custom file, make sure to copy new environment variables from the .env file into the .env.custom file before running the install script.

Finally, to upgrade, run ./install.sh. Upon completion, run docker compose up --wait (or if you have .env.custom file, run docker compose --env-file .env --env-file .env.custom up --wait).

Hard Stops

When upgrading one must upgrade to each hard stop to pick up significant database changes.

These are the hard stops that one needs to go through:

• 9.1.2
• 21.5.0
• 21.6.3
• 23.6.2
• 23.11.0
• 24.8.0

Versions to avoid upgrading to:

• 23.7.0 (issues around database migrations and the Django 3 upgrade)

As an example if one wants to go from 22.8.0 to 24.2.0 one needs the following upgrade path:

# example
(initial: 22.8.0) -> 23.6.2 -> 23.11.0 -> 24.2.0

Nightly Builds

We provide nightly builds from the master branch of the self-hosted repository for each new commit for Sentry, and all of the supporting projects:

• Snuba
• Relay
• Symbolicator
• Vroom

These builds are usually stable, but you may occasionally hit a broken version as these versions are not guaranteed to be deployed to sentry.io first. There is also no guarantee that you will be able to do a clean upgrade to later versions without losing any data. Use the nightly builds at your own risk.

Breaking Changes

• The 23.11.0 release will remove the sentry run smtp worker process. This worker was not part of the standard self-hosted configuration, but could be used in custom deployments.

• The 24.1.2 release will change the memcached backend from django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache to django.core.cache.backends.memcached.PyMemcacheCache. This will require changing the CACHES setting in your sentry.conf.py file in a manner similar to what is seen here. In particular, the OPTIONS API for PyMemcacheCache is different from that of MemcachedCache, and may require changes depending on how it has been configured.