Testing Upgrades in a Non-Production Environment
Before upgrading a production instance, we strongly recommend validating the upgrade against a separate dev or staging instance that mirrors production. This catches version-specific issues against your actual data and configuration before they affect end users. A standard Curator license covers up to three instances, so a dedicated non-production instance is available at no additional cost in most cases. The recommended workflow is:- Export production data. From the production instance, navigate to Settings > Curator > Import/Export and run a full export. Download the resulting archive.
- Stand up a dev instance at the same version as production. Install a fresh Curator instance running the exact same version as production, then use the Import/Export tool on the dev instance to import the archive from step 1. The dev instance should now closely match production.
- Upgrade and validate the dev instance. Perform the upgrade on the dev instance using whichever method you plan to use in production (One-click, Manual, or API). Once the upgrade completes, exercise the integrations and pages most critical to your users — Tableau, Power BI, or ThoughtSpot dashboards, SSO sign-in, scheduled syncs, and any custom themes or pages. Confirm everything renders and behaves as expected.
- Back up and upgrade production. Only after the dev upgrade is validated, take a full Curator Backup of production and then run the same upgrade against production.
Upgrading Curator
One-click Upgrade:- Login to the backend of your Curator instance (e.g.
https://curator.example.com/backend). - Navigate to the Settings > Curator > System Upgrade section using the left-hand menu.
- Click the “Start One-click Upgrade” button.
- Login to the backend of your Curator instance (e.g.
https://curator.example.com/backend). - Navigate to the Settings > Curator > System Upgrade section using the left-hand menu.
- Click the “Manual Upgrade” button to display the Manual Upgrade links in the release notes section at the bottom of the page.
- Click the link of the version you wish to upgrade to, this will download a .zip file containing the upgrade contents.
- Upload the .zip file you just downloaded to the “Upgrade Zip Archive” section and click the “Submit” button.
- Login to the backend of your Curator instance (e.g.
https://curator.example.com/backend). - Navigate to the Settings > Curator > API Keys section using the left-hand menu.
- Select an existing key or create a new key
- If creating a new key, save the key.
- From the REST API dropdowns, select ‘Portal’ in the left dropdown and ‘Upgrade’ in the right dropdown.
- Click the link that was generated below the drop-downs.
- This will open a new tab, when upgrade is successful a small success text display will populate.
Troubleshooting
Having Issues With the Upgrade? Try our Upgrade Troubleshooting Documentation.PHP Version Compatibility
The System Upgrade page automatically checks your server’s PHP version against each release’s minimum PHP requirement. If your server’s PHP version is too old for a given release:- The Upgrade button for that release will be disabled and shown in red as “PHP X.X+ Required”.
- An exclamation icon will appear next to the version number.
- In the Manual Upgrade download column, a warning note will appear: “Requires PHP X.X+ — upgrade PHP before installing”.
- If you attempt a one-click upgrade to an incompatible release, the confirmation dialog will block the upgrade and direct you to update PHP first.