Upgrading the ABP Framework

This document explains how to upgrade your existing solution when a new ABP Framework version is published.

ABP UPDATE Command

ABP Framework & module ecosystem consist of hundreds of NuGet and NPM packages. It would be tedious to manually update all these packages to upgrade your application.

ABP CLI provides a handy command to update all the ABP related NuGet and NPM packages in your solution with a single command:

abp update

Run this command in the terminal while you are in the root folder of your solution.

If your solution has the Angular UI, you probably have aspnet-core and angular folders in the solution. Run this command in the parent folder of these two folders.

The Blog Posts

Sometimes we introduce new features/changes that requires to make changes in the startup template. We already implement the changes in the startup template for new applications. However, in some cases you need to manually make some minor changes in your solution.

Whenever you upgrade your solution, it is strongly suggested to check the ABP BLOG to learn the new features and changes coming with the new version. We regularly publish posts and write these kind of changes. If the changes are not trivial, we also provide migration guides.

Semantic Versioning & Breaking Changes

We are working hard to keep the semantic versioning rules, so you don't get breaking changes for minor (feature) versions like 3.1, 3.2, 3.3...

However, there are some cases we may introduce breaking changes in feature versions too;

• ABP has many integration packages and sometimes the integrated libraries/frameworks releases major versions and makes breaking changes. In such cases, we carefully check these changes and decide to upgrade the integration package or not. If the impact of the change is relatively small, we update the integration package and explain the change in the release blog post. In such a case, if you've used this integration package, you should follow the instructions explained in the blog post. If the change may break many applications and not easy to fix, we decide to wait this upgrade until the next major ABP Framework release.
• Sometimes we have to make breaking change to fix a major bug or usage problem. In this case, we think that developer already can't properly use that feature, so no problem to fix it with a breaking change. In such cases, the feature will generally be a rarely used feature. Again, we try to keep the impact minimum.

Preview Releases & Nightly Builds

Preview releases and nightly builds can help you to try new features and adapt your solution earlier than a new stable release.

• Preview releases are typically published ~2 weeks before a minor (feature) version (our minor version development cycle is about ~4 weeks).
• Nightly builds are published in every night (except weekends) from the development branch. That means you can try the previous day's development.

Refer to the their documents to learn details about these kind of releases.