Wikibase Suite (WBS) uses semantic versioning. Patch and minor releases within your current major version are compatible and can be upgraded directly, while major releases may contain breaking changes and require a version-specific upgrade procedure.
WBS Docker Images are released separately and can receive compatible updates without changing your WBS version. See Wikibase Suite (WBS) Versions for a full explanation of WBS and Docker Image versioning.
Before upgrading WBS, review the WBS changelog for the release you want to install.
Patch and minor upgrades within your current major WBS version do not require a migration.
If you have not already, log in to your server and change to your WBS directory.
If you customized docker-compose.yml, commit your changes and reconcile them with the target release. Otherwise, continue to the next step.
Replace the example wbs@8.0.1 tag below with the tag for the release you are upgrading to, then fetch the tag, check it out, pull the images, and start the services.
[!NOTE] WBS 7 and earlier releases use
deploy@…tags; WBS 8 and later releases usewbs@…tags.
git remote update
git checkout wbs@8.0.1
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d
Major WBS releases may contain breaking changes and require a version-specific migration. WBS supports migrating only one major version at a time because MediaWiki and its extensions may require intermediate database and configuration changes.
For example, upgrading from WBS 5 to WBS 8 requires migrating from WBS 5 to 6, then 6 to 7, then 7 to 8.
Before beginning, review the WBS changelog for the target release, then follow each required migration guide:
Downgrading WBS versions is not supported. For recovery options after an unsuccessful upgrade, see Backing Up and Restoring.
WBS Docker Images are released independently from WBS. Your WBS configuration references compatible major-version image tags, allowing newer minor and patch image releases—including security updates—to be pulled without upgrading WBS itself.
Before updating, you can review the changelog for any images you want to check:
To update the images used by your installation:
If you have not already, log in to your server and change to your WBS directory.
For a production instance, back up your data if you need a rollback point. The backup procedure stops WBS; continue directly with the next step.
Pull the images and apply the updates. Running services remain available while the images download; Compose then recreates only the services whose images changed.
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d
If you installed extensions in config/extensions, keep them up to date independently. See Updating Extensions for the update procedure.
To pull compatible WBS Docker Image updates whenever you start the stack:
If you have not already, log in to your server and change to your WBS directory.
Run:
docker compose up -d --pull always
You can run this command manually or schedule it with a systemd timer, cron job, or similar.
This updates only the WBS Docker Images referenced by the current docker-compose.yml. It does not upgrade WBS to another release, perform a major version upgrade, or update extensions in config/extensions.