Upgrading to the latest release

If you’re familiar with previous releases of Hyperledger Fabric, you’re aware that upgrading the nodes and channels to the latest version of Fabric is, at a high level, a four step process.

  1. Backup the ledger and MSPs.
  2. Upgrade the orderer binaries in a rolling fashion to the latest Fabric version.
  3. Upgrade the peer binaries in a rolling fashion to the latest Fabric version.
  4. Update the orderer system channel and any application channels to the latest capability levels, where available. Note that some releases will have capabilities in all groups while other releases may have few or even no new capabilities at all.
  5. If you want to migrate your network by removing the orderer system channel, check out Create a channel.

For more information about capabilities, check out Channel capabilities.

For a look at how these upgrade processes are accomplished, please consult these tutorials:

  1. Considerations for getting to v2.x. This topic discusses the important considerations for getting to the latest release from the previous release as well as from the most recent long term support (LTS) release.
  2. Upgrading your components. Components should be upgraded to the latest version before updating any capabilities.
  3. Updating the capability level of a channel. Completed after updating the versions of all nodes.
  4. Enabling the new chaincode lifecycle. Necessary to add organization specific endorsement policies central to the new chaincode lifecycle for Fabric v2.x.

As the upgrading of nodes and increasing the capability levels of channels is by now considered a standard Fabric process, we will not show the specific commands for upgrading to the newest release. Similarly, there is no script in the fabric-samples repo that will upgrade a sample network from the previous release to this one, as there has been for previous releases.

Note

It is a best practice to upgrade your SDK to the latest version as a part of a general upgrade of your network. While the SDK will always be compatible with equivalent releases of Fabric and lower, it might be necessary to upgrade to the latest SDK to leverage the latest Fabric features. Consult the documentation of the Fabric SDK you are using for information about how to upgrade.

Upgrading to the latest release