Want to test upgrading from Xenial to new build, yet swapping is final

Hi everyone,

I’m needing to update a few of my sites away from the Xenial build image, which is deprecated. However, as noted in the forum, swapping away from Xenial is considered a “final” choice and once I swap away and save I won’t be able to go back.

The migration guide, however, mentions that for testing I’m supposed to lock builds, upgrade the build image, then attempt a deploy and see what happens. Yet given that swapping the build image is supposed to be final, how can I test upgrading away from Xenial without locking myself out of being able to go back in case I need to troubleshoot?

The migration guide, for reference: Please read! End of support for Xenial build image: Everything you need to know

You are little late to the testing. We have started this deprecation process months ago, where you had a chance to swap to the old one.

Now, you need to work on fixing the problems that you can get after the upgrade anyways, because post November 15, you won’t be able to use the old build image anyways. The site would not build till you upgrade to the new one.

@AFleisc As @hrishikesh mentioned, it’s a little late now to do the recommended testing way. However you still have some alternatives before November 15th:

  • Have you tried creating a new site with the same repo? That’ll link it to the Focal image and you can try building there. You can stop builds in the old site in the meantime if you want to avoid running extra builds.
  • Alternatively, it’s possible to trigger builds with a specific build image via the API, but it’ll be harder to test new changes that way. You can set the image param to focal in this call: Netlify API documentation

Hope that helps!

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