Maintenance and Updates¶

If you host your own pretalx instance, you also need to care about the availability of your service and the safety about your data yourself. This page gives you some information that you may need to do so.

Backups¶

There are two things which you should create backups of:

Database: Your SQL database (SQLite or PostgreSQL). This is critical and you must always always create automatic backups of your database. There are tons of tutorials on the internet on how to do this, and the process depends on the choice of your database. For PostgreSQL, see the pg_dump tool. For SQLite, it is sufficient to create a backup of the database file. You should create a cronjob or timer that does the backups for you on a regular schedule.
Data directory: The data directory of your pretalx configuration may contain files that you want to back up. If you did not specify a secret in your config file, back up the .secret text file in the data directory. If you lose the secret, all active user sessions will be invalid. You should back up the media subdirectory of the data directory. It contains all user-uploaded and generated files. This includes files you could in theory regenerate (talk and speaker images for social media, html exports), but also files that you or your users would need to re-upload (event logos, profile pictures, etc.).

There is no need to create backups of the redis database, if you use it. We only use it for non-critical, temporary or cached data.

Monitoring¶

To monitor whether your pretalx instance is running, you can issue a GET request to https://pretalx.example.org/healthcheck/. This endpoint tests if the connection to the database and to the configured cache is working correctly. If everything appears to work fine, an empty response with status code 200 is returned. If there is a problem, a status code in the 5xx range will be returned.

Updates¶

Warning

While we try hard not to issue breaking updates, please perform a backup before every upgrade.

If you run your own pretalx instance, you will have to take care of updates, including both system updates and pretalx updates. We highly recommend that you update to the latest pretalx version as soon as it is available, as it may contain security fixes as well as new features.

Release Cycle¶

pretalx uses the following versioning scheme:

Feature releases have a version in the format YEAR.NUMBER.0, so e.g. v2025.2.0 is the second release issued in 2025. Feature releases are issued every couple of months, and we aim to release at least two or three feature releases per year. These releases may contain new functionality, removal of functionality, or any other kind of change. We recommend studying the release notes before upgrading if you are concerned about API or plugin compatibility.
Bugfix releases have a version in the format of year.number.PATCH, so e.g. 2025.2.1 is the first bugfix release after 2025.2.0. Bugfix releases are not released on a schedule, but as required to fix a critical issue that cannot wait for the next feature release. These releases do not contain functional changes unless those functional changes are required to fix a security issue. Bugfix releases are only issued for the latest feature release.

pretalx provides an update check that is turned on by default, and that will send you an email when a new update becomes available. We do not use this update check to collect any identifiable data about your instance, and we highly recommend that you do not turn it off, as skipping updates may introduce security issues.

We also announce all our feature releases on our blog. Additionally, you can refer to our Release Notes, the release history on PyPI, and the release history on GitHub.

When we issue a new feature release, we also provide compatible releases for all plugins developed by us, so we recommend that you update your installed plugins at the same time as the core pretalx system. Most plugins follow a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH version number scheme.

Performing Updates¶

This guide assumes that you followed the Installation documentation.

We try to make upgrades as painless as possible. To this end, we provide Release Notes and our release blog post. Please read them – they contain important upgrade notes and warnings. Also, make sure you have a current backup.

Next, execute the following commands in the same environment as your installation. This may be your pretalx user, or a virtualenv, if you chose a different installation path.

These commands update pretalx first, then the database, then the static files. Once you have executed these steps without seeing any errors, do not forget to restart your service(s):

(env)$ pip3 install --upgrade-strategy eager -U pretalx
(env)$ python -m pretalx check --deploy
(env)$ python -m pretalx migrate
(env)$ python -m pretalx rebuild --npm-install
# systemctl restart pretalx-web
# systemctl restart pretalx-worker  # If you’re running celery

Installing a fixed release¶

If you want to upgrade pretalx to a specific release, you can pin the version in the pip command. Substitute pretalx with pretalx==1.2.3 in the pip install line above like this:

(env)$ pip3 install --user --upgrade-strategy eager pretalx==1.2.3

Installing a commit or a branch version¶

If you’re sure that you know what you’re doing, you can also install a specific commit or branch of pretalx. You can replace main with a short or long commit ID for a specific commit:

(env)$ pip3 install --user --upgrade-strategy eager -U "git+https://github.com/pretalx/pretalx.git@main#egg=pretalx"