Hold Off on Litestream 0.5.0

Summary

Litestream is an open-source tool that backs up SQLite databases to cloud storage in real time. I love it and use it in all of my projects.Litestream is owned by Fly.io, and they paused development on Litestream for almost two years in favor of an alternative project called LiteFS. Two weeks ago, Ben Johnson, Litestream’s creator and lead developer, announced that they were shifting focus back to Litestream and had just published a new release, 0.5.0.I tried out Litestream 0.5.0, but I caution other Litestream users to give it another release and more extensive testing before deploying it in production. I had a bumpy experience migrating to the new version of Litestream.Note: I’m not complaining about Litestream. I love Litestream, and I’m glad to see renewed development. I’m just hoping to save other Litestream users from running into the same bugs I’m hitting.The expected migration work 🔗︎There are two tasks that are intentional in upgrading from previous versions of Litestream to v0.5.0 and above:The backup format has changed, so Litestream 0.5.0 cannot restore from backups created in previous versions of Litestream.The litestream.yml configuration file format has changed slightly. There used to be an array field called replicas, but 0.5.0 changes this to a dictionary called replica (singular).Litestream has published a helpful migration guide with more details.One of the benefits of Litestream 0.5.0 is that there’s now an official litestream Docker image. All of my previous Docker containers required a lot of boilerplate to download the correct version of Litestream and make it available in my container, but now it reduces to a single Dockerfile line:COPY --from=litestream/litestream:0.5.0 /usr/local/bin/litestream /app/litestream My test migration to Litestream 0.5.0 🔗︎To test out Litestream 0.5.0, I tried deploying it on my project, What Got Done. This is a good project for testing because:I already announced that I was shutting down this service, so users hav...