I need to update ddev on all my projects, how can I do that?

Question

My ddev installation has gotten quite old... I've just been going along quite happily with v1.0, and now they're at v1.5.0. How do I catch up? Is it hard? What are the risks?

Answer 1

There are two major things that I can think of in recent releases:

1. We switched from bind-mounted databases to docker-volume mounted databases.
2. We upgraded to Mariadb 10.2, TYPO3 v8 has trouble with MariaDB 10.2, but not much else does.

Here's what I recommend:

• Get a db dump of each project. I save dumps like that in a directory named .tarballs in the project. (Use the original techniques from How can I export a database from ddev? or do it however you like. If your version already has ddev export-db use that). Having reasonable db dumps around is always a good idea.
• Make a good backup of ~/.ddev where the databases were stored until about v1.2 (they now live on docker volumes).
• Make a good backup of your projects.
• Make sure all your projects have been rm'ed (ddev list should show nothing, preferably docker ps -a should show nothing). If you have a version with the feature, just use ddev rm -a
• Move your ~/.ddev out of the way. mv ~/.ddev ~/.ddev.bak so you don't even have those bind-mounted databases any more.
• Upgrade ddev to the latest version
• In each project as you come to it, ddev config it and then ddev start and ddev import-db from your saved db dump.