Evergreen Tracks
Evergreen Tracks are here. When enabled in your dotCMS Cloud environment, updates will happen automatically along one of three release tracks — so you can keep production conservative while your dev environment validates the newest releases. No code branches, no backports, no upgrade projects.
What Evergreen Tracks Are#
An Evergreen Track controls how fresh a release each of your environments receives. Every track installs the same released artifacts — the only difference is when. A release lands on the Latest track first, then advances to Standard and Trailing as it ages through its stabilization windows.
Tracks describe version age, not a custom schedule. We decide when each track advances, guided by the dotCMS release and support lifecycle and by how each release performs under real usage — we're always monitoring releases and listening to feedback.
The Three Tracks#
| Track | Release Timing | Recommended For |
|---|---|---|
| Latest | Immediately on release | Teams with solid CI/CD practices that want fixes and enhancements as soon as they ship — and dev or early-validation environments |
| Standard | Every two weeks, after a short stabilization window | Most environments — this is the default |
| Trailing | Every two weeks, after an extended stabilization window | Conservative or production-leaning environments |
All existing dotCMS Cloud environments are on the Standard track by default. If that's the right pace for you, there's nothing to do — you're already set.
How Updates Work#
- Automatic, age and health gated. An environment updates itself in place once a release has aged into its track's window — and only if that release is healthy. If we flag a release with a known issue, we hold it back automatically.
- Zero downtime. Updates apply as in-place rolling updates on the regular maintenance cadence — no outage, and your environment keeps serving traffic the whole time.
- See what changed. Every release and its changes are published in the changelogs.
Changing Tracks#
Want dev on Latest and production on Trailing? Reach out to dotCMS Support and we'll move any of your environments to the track you want — or confirm which track an environment is on today. Self-service track selection is on our roadmap and coming soon.
A couple of things to know about how track changes apply:
- Moving to a faster track takes effect as soon as our support team makes the change.
- Moving to a slower track never rolls a running version backward. Your environment simply stays put until its current version ages into the new track, and updates resume from there.