Migration guide

This sections indicates how to migrate your assistant to a new Botfront version.

As we haven't reached 1.x minor versions are considered major and could have breaking changes.

Botfront and Rasa versions are tightly coupled. To avoid compatibility issues when installing or upgrading, use the CLI and Helm charts enforce compatibility.

Minor versions

Minor upgrades are generally seamless.

With the CLI

You can run botfront upgrade in your terminal.

With Kubernetes

You can upgrade our Helm Charts.

Although we offer seperate charts for the Botfront framework and Rasa itself, they both have the same version. Installing the same chart version for both Botfront and Rasa ensures that Rasa and Botfront versions are compatible.

Major versions

When upgrading to a major version, always flush locally build images as follows:

docker rmi <folder_name>_rasa # e.g. docker rmi my_project_rasa
docker rmi <folder_name>_actions

Then process with the following steps:

Upgrade the botfront CLI: npm install -g botfront
Create a new project with botfront init.
Copy the botfront-db folder from your old project to the newly created project. Make sure to copy and not move your db so you can always recover it from your existing project. Your existing project should remain unchanged.
If you have custom actions, copy them to the actions folder in the new project.
Run your project with botfront up. At this point, you should be able to log in.

Check below if specific instructions apply to the version you are migrating to.

0.27.x -> 1.0.0

There is no automatic migration to 1.0, however migrating is easy:

Export your project in Rasa format
For each language, copy the content of your pipeline and policies to a congig-<lang>.yaml file. E.g. config-en.yaml. Yes, the policies need to be copied to every file
Save your credentials and endpoints to credentials.yaml and endpoints.yaml
Start Botfront 1.x and import all your files

0.25.x -> 0.26.x

The migration should be straightforward, however because there are significant database changes, make sure:

your Mongo instance has enough memory (especially if running on low-cost VMs) if you have a big NLU dataset
to keep a copy of your DB before the migration, just in case.

0.25.x -> 0.26.x

0.24.x -> 0.25.x

0.23.x -> 0.24.x

0.22.x -> 0.23.x

0.21.x -> 0.22.x

Tracker store definitions

In Settings > Endpoints, replace:

tracker_store:
  store_type: rasa_addons.core.tracker_stores.AnalyticsTrackerStore
  url: 'http://botfront-api:8080'
  project_id: 'bf'

with:

tracker_store:
  store_type:  'rasa_addons.core.tracker_stores.botfront.BotfrontTrackerStore'
  url: 'http://botfront:3000/graphql' # Or the appropriate custom URL

0.20.x -> 0.21.x

0.19.x -> 0.20.x

0.18.x -> 0.19.x

Breaking changes

We significantly changed (and improved) how bot responses work. Only three types remain:

Text
Text with buttons
Image
Custom

If you were using other response types (mostly facebook related such as Templates, Lists, ...) they will be lost. You need to make a copy before upgrading.

nlg:
  url: "http://botfront-api:8080/project/bf/nlg"

with:

nlg:
  type: "rasa_addons.core.nlg.GraphQLNaturalLanguageGenerator"
  url: "http://botfront:3000/graphql" # This should be the same host as the Botfront app

Restart Rasa with botfront restart rasa
Train
You're done, have fun :)

Manual upgrades

Always check that the Botfront and Rasa versions you install are compatible. You can check this file to find out which version of Rasa corresponds to the Botfront version you are upgrading to: https://github.com/botfront/botfront/blob/vX.X.X/cli/project-template/.botfront/botfront.yml (replace vX.X.X with your version, e.g: v0.24.0)

Using the CLI

Developers