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Your VVV install will hopefully serve you for many years, but in order to keep pace with new fixes and improvements, you’ll need to update it from time to time.

Minor versions

Minor versions, e.g. 1.1.x or 2.3.x, contain bug fixes, and sometimes new features. It’s strongly recommended that you update to these versions. Commands to run to update to this version:

git pull # update to latest git version
vagrant plugin update --local # update vagrant plugins
vagrant up --provision # launch the VM

Major versions

Each major version where the first number changes e.g. 1.x.x or 2.x.x, requires a vagrant destroy to download a new VM image, and reinstall everything.

Commands to run to update to this version (remember to backup your database):

# back up your database then
vagrant halt # turn off the VM if it's running
git pull # update to latest git version
vagrant plugin update --local # update vagrant plugins
vagrant destroy # destroy or delete the VM image (not your files!)
vagrant up --provision # download the new VM image and reinstall everything with a provision
# restore the database backup

Thoroughly Updating VVV

The steps in the previous sections will suffice for 99% of cases. It’s rarely needed but if you want to be thorough, follow these steps:

  1. vagrant halt
  2. Make sure your vagrant and virtualbox are up to date. If necessary, download a new vagrant, use the uninstall tool and install a fresh copy.
  3. Run vagrant box update ( optional but probably for the best ).
    1. Vagrant boxes are used when creating brand new VM’s, this only affects users who destroy and recreate their VM
  4. git pull if you used git to install VVV.
    1. If you downloaded VVV as a zip, download and extract a new copy of VVV over the top. Make sure that your existing sites in www aren’t overwritten, and you have DB backups.
    2. If you used git you should be fine
  5. Now your copy of VVV is up to date.
  6. vagrant plugin update --local to update any vagrant plugins.
  7. Run vagrant up --provision to update the box and bring it up.

A Note On Preserving Data

VVV is intended as a developer environment, and you should be able to throw away the VM and rebuild it without losing anything. Having said that, do not keep critical information stored only in VVV, always take backups.

For most users, halting the VM, fetching the latest version, then provisioning is perfectly safe.

If for whatever reason the VVV VM is lost, VVV will attempt to restore from its own backups made, but you should not rely on this ( and you shouldn’t modify these backups either else data loss can occur on provisioning ).

What is the Semantic Versioning standard and how VVV used it

The VVV project uses the semver/semantic versioning system. WordPress for example doesn’t use semver for their releases, so every release can have different changes or backward compatibility changes. For any other issues don’t forget to check the troubleshooting page. While VVV uses semantic versioning, other git repos such as the site templates, or core extension, run on a continuous deployment process. These git repos don’t have set versions.