Migrating to v4.0.0

Since our v3.* release, this is the most significant set of changes introduced into Talk so far, as a major database migration and template change are both required to run it.

Dependencies

If you are running via source, once you update your code, it’s always important to run the following in order to update your dependencies:

yarn

If you are running via Docker, you just have to replace your version number with the desired version from Dockerhub.

Database Migrations

We have introduced several new fields that require the database to be modified. To run these migrations, ensure that all nodes of Talk are stopped. It is not well defined what will happen if a Talk application begins writing data mid migration.

Running the following will start the migration process:

./bin/cli migration run

This will prompt you to perform a database backup before starting the migration process. Data loss is entirely possible otherwise.

The migration itself may take some time to complete, as we’re reformatting documents rather than performing a nice table alter. If the process crashes during the migration, simply re-run it. The migration operations are designed to act atomically, and be idempotent to documents already updated.

Template Change

In v4.0.0, we introduced extensive support for compressing our javascript bundles. To support this, we had to modify our routing. All static files are now served out of a /static prefix, so you will have to change your embed code:

Old:

https://your-talk-url.com/embed.js

New:

https://your-talk-url.com/static/embed.js

This should be changed in your embed code on the site where you are embedding Talk.