Operate

Upgrading

View as Markdown

Upgrades are one command, run on the server:

sudo virtues upgrade

It needs root — the upgrade replaces the installed binary and restarts the service — and it’s deliberately safe to run on a server you care about: the new release is downloaded and staged completely before anything changes, then activated in one atomic flip. The binary, the web app, and the actions runtime move together, so you can’t end up with a UI newer than the server underneath it. A failure before the flip leaves the server exactly as it was; a failure after the flip rolls straight back.

Channels

There are two release channels:

  • Stable — vX.Y.Z releases. What a server should be on unless you’ve chosen otherwise, and the default for every command below.
  • Prerelease — the newest staging build, versioned like vX.Y.Z-staging.N. Explicit opt-in via --pre. If you’ve heard it called edge or nightly, this is the same thing.

Your server remembers its channel, so a plain sudo virtues upgrade keeps following whichever line it’s on. --pre is a one-off override, not a permanent switch.

Checking before you leap

sudo virtues upgrade --check

reports what’s available without changing anything. Add --pre to check the prerelease line. This is the dry run — it tells you the version you’d get and whether the server considers itself ready to take it.

Pinning a version

sudo virtues upgrade --version v0.1.4

installs a specific tag instead of the newest release. Resolution order is explicit: --version wins over --pre, which wins over the stored channel, which defaults to stable.

Rolling back

sudo virtues rollback

flips back to the previous release — a pure switch and service restart, with no database surgery. Releases are kept in slots on disk precisely so the last known-good one is still there when you want it.

If upgrade says your install is too old

Very old installs predate the slot layout the upgrader expects. The command will tell you, and the fix is the installer, which migrates in place:

curl -sSL https://virtues.com/sh | sudo sh

Updated 2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z