Upgrading to Strapi 5: Introduction and FAQ

The latest major version of Strapi is Strapi 5. Strapi v4 is still supported until March 2026.

Whenever you feel ready to upgrade to Strapi 5, the present page will help you. It lists all available resources for upgrading from Strapi 4 to Strapi 5 and answers general questions you might have.

Available resources

All of the following available resources will help you upgrade your application and plugins to Strapi 5, from the most common to the most specific use cases:

1️⃣ Step-by-step guide

Read this guide first to get an overview of the upgrade process.

2️⃣ Upgrade tool reference

Learn more about how the upgrade tool can automatically migrate some parts of your Strapi v4 application to Strapi 5.

3️⃣ Breaking changes list

Read more about the differences between Strapi v4 and v5, the resulting breaking changes, and how to handle them manually or with the help of the codemods provided with the upgrade tool.

4️⃣ Specific resources

Handle specific use cases such as the deprecation of the Entity Service API in favor of the new Document Service API, the plugins migration, and the deprecation of the helper-plugin.

Frequently asked questions

The following questions and their answers should help you cover the most common use cases:

How can I handle the upgrade and the installation of the latest dependencies?
How can I handle the breaking changes in the code and adapt my code to Strapi 5?

Strapi provides an upgrade tool to ease the process. The upgrade tool is a command line tool with some commands that handle the upgrade of the dependencies and the execution of codemods .

Follow the step-by-step guide to learn how to use this tool in the context of upgrading to Strapi 5.

Strapi 5 docs also provide a complete breaking changes database and dedicated resources to cover specific use cases.

How can I handle the data migration, ensuring that in Strapi 5 the application will still be working?

Strapi 5 integrates a series of data migration scripts that are run once the application starts for the first time in Strapi 5.

However, please always backup your database (found at .tmp/data.db by default if using a SQL database) before performing any upgrade, as instructed in the step-by-step guide.

As a Strapi Cloud customer, how can I handle the entire upgrade and deployment of my Strapi 5 application?

Create a backup and update your code locally, following the step-by-step guide.
Run the yarn deploy or npm run deploy commands from the Cloud CLI.

Strapi Cloud will deploy the updated code in Strapi 5 and will automatically run the data migration script.

🤓 Why Strapi 5?

The Strapi blog has some additional information about commonly asked questions, including why some changes were made.