Better Upgrade / Node Mismatch Comments in CLI

Developer help
1

Hi all,

I’m not active enough around here to post this in “Ideas,” but I just spent waaaaay too long going around in circles trying to upgrade from a pretty outdated instance of Ghost (5.13) to the newest one (5.100). I’m managing my Node installs using nvm on my DigitalOcean droplet, and for a while I was getting a very circular error. When I was using node 16.17, it was telling me I could not upgrade to 5.100. When I switched over to 18.12.1, it was telling me THAT version was unsupported in my current installation! It felt like a real catch-22.

Now, I should have thought of this sooner, but then I consulted the Node version chart to see if I could take an intermediary step. So I upgraded to 5.47.0, which worked. Then I switched to Node 18.x.x, then I was able to get up to Ghost 5.100.

I would like to suggest just a tad more information be added to the message that happens when the upgrade fails due a Node version incompatability, something like (new language in bold):

Ghost v5.100.0 is not compatible with the current Node version. Your node version is 16.13.0. The most recent Ghost for that version of Node is 5.47.0.

Thanks for considering, if anyone in here has that power! Might save folks some time in the future!

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2

I’m glad you got that worked out and I agree what you suggest would be a better user experience for CLI upgrades.

This is also why Ghost should make the container images an officially supported install message.

Container images bundle a Node version with each version of Ghost, categorically eliminating the common problem of node version mismatch during upgrades.

Yes, Containers bring their own challenges, but I’m increasingly convinced they are a net positive.

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