Strapi v3 to v4 Migration Resources

If you are currently in the process of migrating from Strapi v3 to Strapi v4 and would like some resource links to point you in the right direction we have compiled a list of several resources for you.

As a general reminder, we recommend the following 4 step process for most migrations:

1. Migrate your base v3 codebase to v4 (using a different source control branch or repo)
   1. Exclude any customizations to start with
   2. Do not perform content-type or field name changes here, schema modifications should come later
   3. Exclude any custom or community plugins here, just the base code base to start with
      
      
2. Start testing and validating data migrations to ensure you are familiar with the process and any cleanup can be done and automated
   
   
3. Start migrating any custom code, plugins, extensions, etc as well as testing integrations with your front-end
   1. It's quite likely that you may not need to completely migrate some customizations if Strapi now has native support for several new features
   2. Generally we advise using REST over GraphQL in Strapi v4 as their feature parity is almost identical and given that  performance of REST is quite a bit better, however GraphQL speed has still significantly increased in Strapi v4
      
      
4. Begin testing your migration process and building your plan to move from v3 to v4 in production
   1. We absolutely do recommend at least a 1 hour maintenance period, though depending on the complexity of your deployment process this may need to be long
   2. You should do several test runs and have documented and practiced roll back plans should your first attempt fail

As part of your migration process, for Silver and Gold customers, we (Strapi) will be available for scheduling to help answer any questions, comments, or concerns and can be made available, within reason, to join your production deployment maintenance call as a standby emergency resource.

All calls or virtual meetings are subject to schedule availability of our team, please keep in mind we have several customers and migration is not directly covered under your enterprise support contract. We are extending these options to you outside of that agreement.

Please speak with your CSM or support agents via the support portal or tickets to learn more.

Documentation

Official documentation published by us for doing migration steps manually and some design diagrams to explain some of the new concepts.

• Code Migration Guide
• Data Migration Guide (Manual)
• Plugin Migration Guide (for custom plugins)

Tooling

Scripts and tooling designed and build by us or some of our technical parts to help ease and automate the migration process.

• Codemods (used to help automate some of the code migration process)
• Data Migration Scripts(used to help automate migrating your data)
  • v3 MongoDB to v3 SQL
  • v3 SQL to v4 SQL

Blog posts and videos

Misc set of additional resources if you prefer more video resources or to cover some more abstract/subjective content.

• [Blog] Migration Blog Post
• [Video] Migration Playlist
  • Migration Overview Video
  • Migration using Codemods
  • Food Advisor migration example - Setup and Overview
  • Food Advisor migration example - Migration with Codemods
  • Food Advisor migration example - Migrating custom controllers
• [Video] Complete migration walkthrough (note: > 1hr length)
• [Video] Database Migration with Q&A
• [Video] Differences between v3 and v4, what changed and why?

Anything missing?

If you feel there is anything missing or if you still have questions about migration please open a ticket and we will point you in the right direction!