I ran across this article today:

https://neon.tech/blog/why-does-everyone-run-ancient-postgres-versions

and it made me check. I generally go with whatever the current stable version is for new projects, since my stuff is almost always sized such that I'm running postgres on the same server where I'm running django.

But I've got some stuff out there that's sitting on postgres 13. That means I probably have around a year to upgrade it before it stops getting patches.

What version are people here sitting on? And how do you handle upgrades? Do you take downtime? Do you go read only for a while?

For my thing that's on 13, I think my plan when I upgrade it will look something like:

• Lower DNS TTL (a few days in advance)

• Go read only

• Spin up a new VPS with an upgraded version of postgres

• Import data there, start my django app and do a sanity check.

• Move DNS to the new VPS

• Go read-write

• Decommission the old VPS

• Put DNS TTL back to normal (once it's happy for a few days)

I think I'll be able to finish this with a read only period being less than a few hours that I'll time for a relatively low usage hour of the night.

I'd love to hear what others do for this.