Administrator guide
Upgrade safely
Select the latest signed stable release or an exact image, apply it transactionally, and prove the result.
opencircle upgrade is the day-two replacement path for Compose profiles. opencircle deploy is not — deploy has no automatic backup and no rollback. For Railway, use the separate protected upgrade and resume path instead.
Plan without mutation
Terminal
opencircle profile list opencircle status --profile circle-server opencircle release plan --profile circle-server
release plan previews the default server-only artifact and a compatibility check — it is read-only. There is no separate apply command; upgrade owns the mutation.
Select the release
Terminal
opencircle upgrade \ --profile circle-server \ --backup-dir /path/to/operator-controlled-backups
Bare upgrade verifies the signed stable channel and selects its exact immutable digest before the transaction begins. To move to a specific reviewed release instead, pass its canonical reference:
Terminal
opencircle upgrade \ --profile circle-server \ --image ghcr.io/opencircle/opencircle-runtime@sha256:<image-digest> \ --backup-dir /path/to/operator-controlled-backups
The default replaces only the OpenCircle Server component; add --full only when a release explicitly requires a full-stack replacement.
Transaction boundary
The guarded path drains work, stops the Server, creates and verifies a full recovery bundle, applies the selected artifact, runs an acceptance check, and clears maintenance. On failure it restores the bundle and prior image and proves health before finishing.
--no-rollback deliberately leaves the failed target and bundle for manual investigation. It is not a faster ordinary upgrade — record the bundle path before using it.
Verify and recover
After success, compare the deployment identity with the immutable artifact and prove owner sign-in plus the feature you upgraded for. If automatic rollback fails, treat the target as critical: preserve the bundle, prior-image identity, and logs, then follow Back up and restore.