Coder Release Channels and Schedule

Recently, we’ve had many requests for guidance on when to upgrade a Coder deployment. When a new Coder release comes out, should you upgrade?

In the past, we’ve cut minor releases ad-hoc roughly monthly depending on the demand for in-progress features and the velocity of our engineering team. These releases were always cut from our main code branch with rare support for older versions and few guarantees of stability. We understand this introduces some ambiguity on what version is safest to use.

To remedy this, we’ve introduced a new release process that establishes a strict monthly release date on the first Tuesday of every month and separates new versions of Coder into mainline and stable release channels.

Mainline and stable releases. Which should you use?

Our mainline releases are intended for OSS community users and enterprise users with staging deployments who want the absolute latest coder features. These are fielded publicly for a month before we promote them to stable.

Stable releases, as the name suggests, are intended for large enterprise deployments with little tolerance for fault. This remains the default path for all installation methods excluding our install.sh script.

On the first Tuesday of every month, we’ll cut a new minor release as “mainline” and promote the previous minor release to “stable.” Both of these versions will be supported in patching major bugs, security vulnerabilities and regressions. Thus, we’ll support each Coder release for exactly two months.

What does this mean for your team?

We hope this increases confidence in the stability of new Coder releases and offers clear guidance on when to upgrade your deployment. Defining a strict schedule should allow you and your team better anticipation for feature delivery and time to plan for updating Coder.

For enterprise customers, we advise updating Coder to the stable release routinely to avoid encountering old bugs, take advantage of new performance improvements, and maximize alignment with our support team.

If you have a problem on either release, please continue to reach out and we’ll be happy to get out a patch for any blocking issues.

How does this impact installation?

To increase adoption of the mainline coder release on clients, we’ve set it as the default path for our install.sh script. All other means of installation will default to our latest stable release. However, we always recommend explicitly defining a version from our Github releases when updating your control plane.

For more information about our release channels and schedule as well as future updates to our process, see our releases page in the documentation.