Making Django Upgrades Easy(er)

At Rover Engineering, we recently undertook a major project to upgrade our Django version from 1.8 up to 1.11. As a team, we’ve done our share of Django upgrades before. This time however, we were particularly ambitious in upgrading three versions plus dependencies back-to-back with a goal of little to no interruption to the other projects going on in the tech team. And we were already busy! A couple months in, things are going pretty smoothly - we’ve managed to successfully land our other big projects, make significant progress, and we’re now about ready to put the final pieces out into production. It used to be a fairly painful process to upgrade, but we’ve definitely learned a few lessons along the way, and made our lives easier with some smart planning. Here are the lessons we’ve learned through this process:

• Ship what you can before you ship the actual upgrade. For us, we use Docker for our dev environment, so we could build with the latest Django version, update our code, then build again with our currently running version to verify compatibility. Try to identify package updates and other changes that are backwards compatible. This will save you the headache of dealing with a gigantic change all at once. It also helps by splitting the gargantuan task of upgrading into much smaller, more manageable pieces. This is of course made easier if you already deploy frequently.

• Take the time to to evaluate if you actually need all your dependencies. Features in some packages may now be present in core Django, or in another package you already require. For us, this was particularly true for projects we’d previously needed to fork because they were no longer maintained. Often, these projects were shortcuts we’d made years ago that we now have the tools to implement in a better way. Your future self will thank you for putting in the work to remove unneeded external dependencies.

• Avoid undocumented features and use the patterns the documentation is giving you. This is less specific to upgrading and in general just a good practice. I’m including it in this list because it becomes very apparent when you’ve broken this rule when you are upgrading your framework. Using an undocumented feature of Django is often a debt you have to pay at upgrade time. Take the opportunity to eliminate these from your code base if you can.

• Involve members across the tech team in the upgrade process. Since no one person can know everything there is to know about your app, make sure to involve those that have specific knowledge of all the various nooks and crannies. This helps ensure you’re looking at the right thing and making sure there aren’t going to be any hidden surprises later on. Involving other engineers also has the bonus of sharing the new features and patterns to the team as a whole and getting teams excited about the new tools they have available to them.

• Set aside time to keep your ear to the ground for issues after shipping. In my experience, no matter how thorough you are, there’s always something. If you’ve put in the work, it’s very likely minor. For me, I like to keep tuned in to what’s going on with customer facing teams so I can respond quickly to anything that is not working like it should. You should also use this time to document what you’ve done, field questions about the changes, and reflect on what was most painful and why. There’s almost certainly a way to make it even smoother next time.

There are no doubt lots of other things to keep in mind for when it’s time to upgrade - every code base will be different and every engineering team will be different. For Rover, these are the things that have helped us get through the pain that comes with upgrading your framework. For those of you considering upgrading, with some work and careful planning, I can say that we made it very successfully to the other side.

Rachel Tobin is a Software Engineer at Rover.com, the nation’s largest online marketplace of 5-star pet sitters and dog walkers. Her team is focused on robustness, scalability, and developer productivity at Rover. She has three adorable cats.