authelia/docs/content/policies/versioning.md

title	description	summary	date	draft	images	toc	type	aliases	seo
Versioning Policy	The Authelia Versioning Policy which is important reading for administrators		2022-12-21T20:48:14+11:00	false		false	legal	/versioning-policy /versioning	title description canonical noindex false

The Authelia team aims to abide by the Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 policy. This means that we use the format <major>.<minor>.<patch> for our version numbers, where a change to major denotes a breaking change which will likely require user interaction to upgrade, minor which denotes a new feature, and patch denotes a fix.

It is therefore recommended users do not automatically upgrade the minor version without reading the patch notes, and it's critically important users do not upgrade the major version without reading the patch notes. You should pin your version to 4.37 for example to prevent automatic upgrades of the minor version, or pin your version to 4 to prevent automatic upgrade of the major version.

We generally do not recommend automated upgrades of critical systems but instead recommend ensuring you are notified an upgrade exists.

Important Notes

1. While we make every effort to ensure zero breaking changes occur, this versioning policy does not cover the following at this time:
   1. Changes between stable releases. i.e. changes to master, alpha, beta, pre-release, or any other testing build.
   2. The notable exceptions.
2. Examples (i.e. it's not limited to these examples) of the changes which may occur between stable releases are:
   • Features may be removed.
   • The method of configuring unreleased features may change. i.e. configuration keys may change, or additional keys may be required to enable a feature.
3. Significant manual changes may be required to gain access to new features depending on their implementation and complexity. This however does not mean existing functionality is intended to break, just new functionality may be unavailable without manual intervention.
4. There may be deprecations in minor or patch releases. This however does not mean that you can't continue to use the deprecated item, it just means it's discouraged as it does mean that it's likely in the next major release it will be completely removed. This applies but is not limited to:
   • Features.
   • Configuration Keys.

Supported Versions

The following information is indicative of our support policy:

• We provide support to user questions for 3 minor versions at minimum
• We provide bug fixes (as a patch) to the latest minor version
• We provide vulnerability fixes:
  • As workarounds in the security advisory (if possible)
  • As patches in the security advisory
  • To the last 3 minor versions upon request

Major Version Zero

A major version of v0.x.x indicates as per the Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 policy that there may be breaking changes without warning. Some components will be released under this version while they're in early development.

Components

Several components may exist at various times. We aim to abide by this policy for all components related to Authelia. It is important to note that each component has its own version, for example the primary Authelia binary version may be v4.40.0 but another component such as the Helm Chart version may be v0.9.0.

This means that a breaking change may occur to one but not the other as these components do not share a version.

Exceptions

There are exceptions to this versioning policy and this section details these exceptions. It should be noted while there may be breaking changes in these exception areas we generally avoid making them where possible.

Advanced Customizations

Some advanced customizations are not guaranteed by the versioning policy. These features require the administrator to ensure they keep up to date with the changes relevant to their version. While the customizations exist as a feature we cannot allow these customizations to hinder the development process.

Notable Advanced Customizations:

• Templates:
  • Email
  • Content Security Policy header
• Localization / Internationalization Assets

Breaking Changes

All features which are marked as:

• beta
• experimental

Notable examples:

• OpenID Connect 1.0
• File Filters

The reasoning is as we develop these features there may be mistakes and we may need to make a change that would normally be considered a breaking change. As these features graduate from their status to generally available they will move into our standard versioning policy and lose their exception status.