if I’m already deploying Ghost using Docker for v5 and don’t want to immediately enabled analytics and federation, is upgrading to v6 as simple as changing my image to ghost:6? or are additional steps needed for a safe upgrade?
If you have a custom/existing container setup then the critical thing with any major update is to read the breaking changes list before attempting to do a major update:
This is what will tell you if there’s something else to do e.g. from 4 → 5 you had to make sure you were on the right type of database before updating.
5 → 6 is relatively light on breaking changes… the most impactful are only Node v22 is supported (but this change is built into the ghost container, whoop) and the removal of ?limit=all from the API, which may mean changing any integrations you have first.
Other than that, be aware we are more liberal with migrations in a major version and they can take longer to run. For 5 → 6 most sites will complete migrations in under a minute, but some larger sites may have much longer running migrations.
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Just wanted to chime in to say that for me, Ghost 5 → Ghost 6 was the most painless upgrade yet! (And I’ve been self-hosting Ghost with various non-standard setups since v0.3)
I literally just changed ghost:5-alpine to ghost:6-alpine and ran fly deploy. Done!
Thank you @Hannah et al 
I know it isn’t easy to make things easy!
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But you are missing out on the activitypub and analytics when you just use the new version.
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My understanding is that you are using their activitypub service so it works out of the box. At least that’s true for me (self-hosting).
I’m running Ghost 5 in Coolify. Its Docker Compose template looks like this: coolify/templates/compose/ghost.yaml at v4.x · coollabsio/coolify · GitHub It only contains two services: Ghost and MySQL.
But in version 6 of Ghost there are 7 new services: Caddy, Traffic-analytics, ActivityPub, Tinybird-login, Tinybird-sync, Tinybird-deploy, ActivityPub-migrate. See: ghost-docker/compose.yml at main · TryGhost/ghost-docker · GitHub.
I wonder if it’s that easy to just change the version of Ghost from 5 to 6, and then to add these 7 services?
Anybody who has updated a Docker version of Ghost from 5 to 6 who can tell how it went? What does your Compose file look like now?
Not necessarily. Some of the services run once and not permanently.
See the Tinybird setup here:
You can run these commands locally (outside of Coolify) to get the credentials, to then update the environment variables though.