Upgrading

Supabase ships fast and we endeavor to add all new features to existing projects wherever possible. In some cases, access to new features require upgrading or migrating your Supabase project.

You can upgrade your project using pg_upgrade or by pausing and restoring your project.

pg_upgrade#

pg_upgrade performs an in-place upgrade on your database. For projects larger than 1GB, pg_upgrade is generally faster than a pause+restore cycle, and the speed advantage grows with the size of the database.

1. Plan for an appropriate downtime window, and ensure you have reviewed the caveats section of this document before executing the upgrade.
2. Use the "Upgrade project" button on the Infrastructure section of your dashboard.

Additionally, if a pg_upgrade upgrade should fail, your original DB would be brought back up online and be able to service requests.

As a rough rule of thumb, pg_upgrade operates at ~100mbps (when executing an upgrade on your data). Using the size of your database, you can use this metric to derive an approximate sense of the downtime window necessary for the upgrade. During this window, you should plan for your DB and associated services to be unavailable.

Pause and restore#

When you pause and restore a project, the restored database includes the latest features. This method does include downtime, so be aware that your project will be inaccessible for a short period of time.

1. On the General Settings page in the Dashboard, click Pause project. You will be redirected to the home screen as your project is pausing. This process can take several minutes.
2. After your project is paused, click Restore project. The restoration can take several minutes depending on how much data your database has. You will receive an email once the restoration is complete.

Note that a pause + restore upgrade involves tearing down your project's resources before bringing them back up again. If the restore process should fail, manual intervention from Supabase support will be required to bring your project back online.

Caveats#

Regardless of the upgrade method, a few caveats apply:

Logical replication#

If you are using logical replication, the replication slots will not be preserved by the upgrade process. You will need to manually recreate them after the upgrade with the method pg_create_logical_replication_slot. Refer to the Postgres docs on Replication Management Functions for more details about the method.

Breaking changes#

Newer versions of services can break functionality or change the performance characteristics you rely on. If your project is eligible for an upgrade, you will be able to find your current service versions from within the Supabase dashboard.

Breaking changes are generally only present in major version upgrades of Postgres and PostgREST. You can find their respective release notes at:

• Postgres
• PostgREST

If you are upgrading from a significantly older version, you will need to consider the release notes for any intermediary releases as well.

Time limits#

Starting from 2024-06-24, when a project is paused, users then have a 90-day window to restore the project on the platform from within Supabase Studio.

The 90-day window allows Supabase to introduce platform changes that may not be backwards compatible with older backups. Unlike active projects, static backups can't be updated to accommodate such changes.

During the 90-day restore window a paused project can be restored to the platform with a single button click from Studio's dashboard page.

After the 90-day restore window, you can download your project's backup file, and Storage objects from the project dashboard. See restoring a backup locally for instructions on how to load that backup locally to recover your data.

If you upgrade to a paid plan while your project is paused, any expired one-click restore options are reenabled. Since the backup was taken outside the backwards compatibility window, it may fail to restore. If you have a problem restoring your backup after upgrading, contact Support.

Restoring a downloaded backup locally#

If the 90 day project restore window has expired but you need to access data contained within your project using SQL, you can use the Supabase CLI to restore the project into a local Postgres instance.

First, download your project's backup file from dashboard and identify its backup image version (following the PG: prefix):

Given Postgres version 15.6.1.115, start Postgres locally with db_cluster.backup being the path to your backup file.

Note that the earliest Supabase Postgres version that supports a local restore is 15.1.0.55. If your hosted project was running on earlier versions, you will likely run into errors during restore. Before submitting any support ticket, make sure you have attached the error logs from supabase_db_* docker container.

Once your local database starts up successfully, you can connect using psql to verify that all your data is restored.

If you want to use other services like Auth, Storage, and Studio dashboard together with your restored database, restart the local development stack.

A Postgres database started with Supabase CLI is not production ready and should not be used outside of local development.

Disk sizing#

When upgrading, the Supabase platform will "right-size" your disk based on the current size of the database. For example, if your database is 100GB in size, and you have a 200GB disk, the upgrade will reduce the disk size to 120GB (1.2x the size of your database).

Objects dependent on Postgres extensions#

pg_upgrade does not support upgrading of databases containing reg* data types referencing system OIDs. If you have created any objects that depend on the following extensions, you will need to recreate them after the upgrade.

pg_cron records#

pg_cron does not automatically clean up historical records. This can lead to extremely large cron.job_run_details tables if the records are not regularly pruned; you should clean unnecessary records from this table prior to an upgrade.

During the pg_upgrade process, the pg_cron extension gets dropped and recreated. Prior to this process, the cron.job_run_details table is duplicated to avoid losing historical logs. The instantaneous disk pressure created by duplicating an extremely large details table can cause at best unnecessary performance degradation, or at worst, upgrade process failures.

Extensions#

pg_upgrade does not currently support upgrading of databases using extensions older than the following versions:

• TimescaleDB 2.16.1
• plv8 3.1.10

To upgrade to a newer version of Postgres, you will need to drop the extensions before the upgrade, and recreate them after the upgrade.

Authentication method changes - deprecating md5 in favor of scram-sha-256#

The md5 hashing method has known weaknesses that make it unsuitable for cryptography. As such, we are deprecating md5 in favor of scram-sha-256, which is the default and most secure authentication method used in the latest Postgres versions.

We automatically migrate Supabase-managed roles' passwords to scram-sha-256 during the upgrade process, but you will need to manually migrate the passwords of any custom roles you have created, else you won't be able to connect using them after the upgrade.

To identify roles using the md5 hashing method and migrate their passwords, you can use the following SQL statements after the upgrade:

Database size reduction#

As part of the upgrade process, maintenance operations such as vacuuming are also executed. This can result in a reduction in the reported database size.

Post-upgrade validation#

Supabase performs extensive pre- and post-upgrade validations to ensure that the database has been correctly upgraded. However, you should plan for your own application-level validations, as there might be changes you might not have anticipated, and this should be budgeted for when planning your downtime window.