Upgrading Electrode Native

This section describes how to upgrade and activate a new version of Electrode Native.

Platform versioning

Feature releases We bump the minor version for each of these releases, for example, 0.5.0, 0.6.0, 0.7.0, etc..

Maintenance releases Maintenance releases may be released in-between features releases. A maintenance release is identified by a patch version bump, for example: 0.5.1, 0.5.2, etc.

The intent of maintenance releases is to fix major bugs, having no workaround, that may impact multiple users. A maintenance release helps users so that they don't need to wait for the next main release.

Upgrading to a new platform version

Upgrading the platform is actually quite easy, its just a matter of running an ern command. That being said, before upgrading to a new platform version, you should always read the release notes associated to the version.

Indeed, while we will do our best to retain backward compatibility, some new versions might contain breaking changes that could impact your current workflow.

Before you upgrade

When you upgrade to a newer version of Electrode Native, previous installed versions of Electrode Native remain on your system; an upgrade does not overwrite the older versions.

Before you upgrade to a newer version of Electrode Native, read through the following upgrade guidelines:

• Be sure to read the release notes of the new version.

• An upgrade is usually backward compatible although backwards compatibility with every release is not guaranteed. Check to see if upgrading will impact your current workflow.

• Electrode Native contains a built-in platform version management system--similar to what nvm uses for Node.js, allowing to keep multiple versions of the platform installed on the local system. The system allows easy rollback to a previous platform version or to actually switch back to an older version for some use cases.

• Only one version of the platform can be active at any given time.

To install and switch to a specific version of Electrode Native

• Use the ern platform use command to install and switch to a specific version.

Related commands

ern platform install | Used to install a specific version ern platform uninstall | Used to uninstall a specific version ern platform versions | Used to list all currently available platform versions. Versions that are installed locally and the active version are highlighted.