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Versioning and upgrades

Upgrades

Running security-critical open source technology in a self-service format requires vigilance. We make your life easier by announcing important software updates via the Ory Security Newsletter. Never miss an update and sign up now to important release updates!

Good software improves over time. If it wouldn't, you shouldn't use it. Unfortunately, some of these improvements have breaking changes. We know that breaking changes are annoying so we want to make upgrading as painless as possible.

We document changelogs and upgrade guides for Ory services:

Before upgrading to a newer version, please make sure to check with these documents first.

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Versioning

The Ory ecosystem consists of multiple services versioned using semantic versioning. This section explains how we define service versions and what they mean.

Development stages

important

Ory only releases software that is stable and ready for production!
The sandbox/incubating stage is an indicator of how much the API could change in the future, including backward incompatible changes.

Ory was founded in 2015, secures more than 50B requests monthly and is the most trusted open source ecosystem for authentication & authorization.

There are three main stages of development for services:

  • Graduated: Mature implementations of proven concepts. They rarely change in backwards incompatible ways. A software is considered graduated if the major version is >= 1, for example v1.0.1, v2.2.2. Backwards incompatible changes are indicated by a bump of the major version number. Most, if not all, REST APIs will provide backwards compatible transformations that make it possible to interact with the server using older API versions.
  • Incubating: Implements well defined but not fully matured concepts. Incubating software has a major version number of 0, for example v0.10.0. You may see a pre-release version such as v0.10.0-beta.1. Incubating software has a higher (but overall moderate) probability for larger changes that can break backwards compatibility, for which there are upgrade guides.
  • Sandbox: Implements concepts, APIs and CLIs at the experimental stage and may change in unpredictable ways. Sandbox software has a major version number of 0 with a alpha or beta pre-release indicator, for example v0.10.0-alpha.1. It's more likely that you'll encounter a version tag with a alpha pre-release version. We will provide upgrade guides wherever possible, when they're used in production already.

The following is a list of maturity level per project: