Easy way to upgrade from an old version

[Zhaoyilunnn]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the entire community for developing and maintaining this fantastic tool. I have been using it for several years to build and manage my personal website, and I am truly grateful for all the effort that goes into it.

Lately, I've been facing a challenge when it comes to updating my website. I've noticed that the templates are updated very frequently, which is great for introducing new features and improvements. However, this rapid pace of updates often introduces breaking changes that make the upgrade process quite difficult.

The official guide suggests that upgrading should be as simple as updating the content directory. However, I've found that in practice, the fields within the content files are often no longer compatible with the new templates. This incompatibility requires a significant amount of manual effort to migrate the content, which can be a very painful and time-consuming process.

I was wondering if other members of the community have encountered similar issues. If so, I would be very interested to learn about your strategies for handling these kinds of breaking changes and managing the migration process.

Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

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Although there have been an existing discussion. I really don't feel that manually copying & checking building is a good choice... See the comment.

There are many reasons. The situation for me is like:

1. I created a website
2. After years, I have added many content in the website
3. One day I found a new feature of the new version that is very attractive, I would love to update.
4. I found that I can only manually update, which is way too error proning and I spent a whole day.

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By the way, the author_notes feature in the newest version of academic CV is not working properly

[anayrat]

Hello,
I have the same issue. Upgrade is really painful. I can't find any documentation on how to upgrade my website. I read the changelog and breaking change section. I can't find any help.

[gcushen]

Hello, I have the same issue. Upgrade is really painful. I can't find any documentation on how to upgrade my website. I read the changelog and breaking change section. I can't find any help.

Hugo is growing and Hugo team regularly make breaking changes, so if you have an old version, there will likely be many breaking changes to apply from the release notes on Hugo's Github.

As per the docs, if your site is really old, users typically find it easier to start fresh with the latest version of their site's template and gradually migrate their content across - then the effort to upgrade is minimal as it's just moving your content and site metadata across to the latest version.

If you don't feel the docs have all the answers you need, just post to the Discord support channel or the Hugo Forums and the community will attempt to help you :)