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Upgrading from a Previous Version

Upgrading to Bridgetown 1.2 #

Bridgetown 1.2 brings with it a whole new initialization system along with a Ruby-based configuration format. Your bridgetown.config.yml file will continue to work, but over time you will likely want to migrate a good portion of your configuration over to the new format (and maybe even delete the YAML file).

To upgrade a 1.0 or 1.1 site to 1.2, edit your Gemfile update the version numbers in the argument for the bridgetown and bridgetown-routes (if applicable) gem and then run bundle. We also recommend you add gem "rack", "~> 2.2" as while Bridgetown/Roda supports Rack 3, other ecosystem gems such as our Active Record pluging don’t yet support it.

When you upgrade to v1.2, your site will run in a legacy mode that automatically requires all gems in your Gemfile within the bridgetown_plugins group as before. This legacy mode is only triggered by the absence of the new config/initializers.rb file. To opt-into the new format, create a config/initializers.rb file like so:

Bridgetown.configure do |config|
  # add configuration here
end

Then you won’t need to use the bridgetown_plugins Gemfile group any longer.

Do not attempt to upgrade other Bridgetown plugins along with upgrading to v1.2 unless you intend to adopt the new configuration format. The latest version of many Bridgetown plugins expect the initializers file to be in use.

Also be advised: if you are using the dynamic routes plugin, you must upgrade to the new configuration format. Read more below.

Once you’re using the new configuration format, if you need to use a Bridgetown plugin that’s not yet updated to work with v1.2, you can manually add a require statement to your configuration:

Bridgetown.configure do |config|
  require "my-older-plugin"
  require "some-other-plugin"
end

Otherwise, you’ll be able to add init statements to load in plugins. For example: init :"bridgetown-lit-renderer".

If you’ve been using the Bridgetown SSR and Routes plugins in your Roda server, you can remove the plugin statements in your server/roda_app.rb and instead use the new initializers:

Bridgetown.configure do |config|
  init :ssr
  init :"bridgetown-routes"
end

Other Roda server configuration can be placed within the file as well:

only :server do
  roda do |app|
    app.plugin :default_headers,
      'Content-Type'=>'text/html',
      'Strict-Transport-Security'=>'max-age=16070400;',
      'X-Content-Type-Options'=>'nosniff',
      'X-Frame-Options'=>'deny',
      'X-XSS-Protection'=>'1; mode=block'
  end
end

If you’ve installed the dotenv gem previously to manage environment variables, Bridgetown now has builtin support for the gem. You’re free to remove past code which loaded in dotenv and use the new initializer:

init :dotenv

Read the Initializers documentation for further details.

For plugin authors, the scoping options for helper and filter in the Builder Plugin DSL have been deprecated. You’re encouraged to write simpler helper or filter code that calls the helpers or the filters variables directly to obtain access to the view-specific context. See the Helpers and Filters plugin documentation for more details.

The Builder DSL also offers new define_resource_method (docs here) and permalink_placeholder (docs here) methods which you can use in lieu of older solutions.

Upgrading to Bridgetown 1.1 #

To upgrade your existing 0.2x Bridgetown site to 1.1, you’ll need to specify the new version in your Gemfile:

gem "bridgetown", "1.1.0"

You’ll also need to add Puma to your Gemfile:

gem "puma", "~> 5.6"

Then run bundle update. (You’ll also ensure you’re specifying the latest version of any extra plugins you may have added, such as the feed and seo plugins.)

Next you should run bundle binstubs bridgetown-core so you have access to bin/bridgetown, as this is now the canonical way of accessing the Bridgetown CLI within your project.

You will need to add a few additional files to your project, so we suggest using bridgetown new to create a separate project, then copy these files over:

  • config.ru
  • Rakefile
  • config/puma.rb
  • server/*

Also be sure to run bin/bridgetown webpack update so you get the latest default Webpack configuration Bridgetown provides.

Finally, you can remove start.js and sync.js and well as any scripts in package.json besides webpack-build and webpack-dev (and you can also remove the browser-sync and concurrently dev dependencies in package.json).

Going forward, if you need to customize any aspect of Bridgetown’s build scripts or add your own, you can alter your Rakefile and utilize Bridgetown’s automatic Rake task support.

Your plugins folder will now be loaded via Zeitwerk by default. This means you’ll need to namespace your Ruby files using certain conventions or reconfigure the loader settings. Read the documentation here.

The other major change you’ll need to work on in your project is switching your plugins/templates to use resources. There’s a fair degree of documentation regarding resources here. In addition, if you used the Document Builder API in the past, you’ll need to upgrade to the Resource Builder API.

Get That Live Reloading Going Again

The live reloading mechanism in v1.0 is no longer injected automatically into your HTML layout, so you’ll need to add {% live_reload_dev_js %} (Liquid) or <%= live_reload_dev_js %> (ERB) to your HTML head in order to get live reload working. Please make sure you’ve added BRIDGETOWN_ENV=production as an environment variable to your production deployment configuration so live reload requests won’t be triggered on your public website.

We’ve added an upgrade-help channel in our Discord chat so if you get totally suck, the community can give you a leg up! (Access to the problematic repo in question is almost always a given in order to troubleshoot, so if your code needs to remain private, please create a failing example we can access on GitHub.)

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