Blockchains evolve — hard forks, client upgrades, and protocol changes all touch your explorer infrastructure. This section covers how to handle them.
Two Kinds of Upgrades
Chain Upgrades
When the network you index performs a hard fork or client upgrade, your chain node must be updated before the upgrade height or it will stall — and your explorer with it.
General checklist:
- Follow your chain’s official channels for upgrade announcements and target heights.
- Upgrade the chain node ahead of the fork height, following the chain’s own documentation.
- Verify sync after the fork: confirm the node is producing new blocks past the upgrade height.
- Watch the indexer — the “blocks behind head” metric should return to normal within minutes.
Explorer Software Upgrades
New OpenScan.AI releases add features, index new data types, and occasionally require a database migration or partial reindex. Each guide in this section covers a specific release.
Upgrade Guides
Explorer v2.1 Upgrade
A complete walkthrough of a typical explorer upgrade: taking backups, pulling new images, running migrations, and verifying the deployment.
Best Practices
- Back up the database before any explorer upgrade.
- Upgrade in a staging environment first when possible.
- Schedule around chain forks — don’t stack an explorer migration on top of a hard fork.
- Monitor after every change — see Monitoring.