Hey there!

NodeBB is a great piece of software, but it has a few things that bug me a lot. One of them being the upgrade process. I'm currently on the v0.5.x branch and I have to say: Not a single upgrade worked as described in the docs.

NodeBB’s upgrade path is designed so that upgrading between versions is straightforward.

This is clearly not the case. As mentioned above, I wasn't able to get a single upgrade working, because of friggin' git. I already said a couple times that I'm a dev myself, but I never really used git. I just scratched the surface of it, so if problems like "unresolved merge conflicts" or other exceptions (cough - yes, "exceptions") occur, I just don't know how to deal with them.

Okay, there are things like Google or this forum, but I just want to update and not ask for assistance any time I want to install the newest code. I always ended up downloading the release package from GitHub and replacing old files with new ones manually. That works most of the time, even though I'm not sure if I'm really on 0.5.4 now or not. I replaced the files as usually, but it still says: "Hey, 0.5.4 is out, you should update."

~ Another thing is the plugin system. Plugins are great and the way to install and update them is indeed straightforward. I noticed there were a couple plugin updates available for my installation and I updated all of them right away ending up in a broken installation. Had to reset all plugins. No matter which of them I enable now, I will end up in a "NodeBB is spinning up another process ..." loop.

Guys, I don't know how you manage your stuff and I really love your project, but you should really consider changing the way how upgrades work.

~ NH