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The Open Notes plugin is installed as a Git clone inside the Discourse container. Upgrading means pulling the latest commit and rebuilding — the same flow as installing for the first time.

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Standard upgrade

1

SSH into your Discourse server

ssh user@your-discourse-host
cd /var/discourse
2

Review the changelog

Check the plugin releases for any migration notes or setting changes before rebuilding.
3

Rebuild the container

./launcher rebuild app
The rebuild clones the latest plugin source and bakes it into the container image. Discourse will be unavailable for 5–10 minutes during the rebuild.
4

Verify the upgrade

After the container restarts, check Admin > Plugins and confirm the version number has updated. Then smoke-test your monitored categories by creating a test post and watching for the expected review behavior.

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Pinning a specific version

If you need to pin the plugin to a specific commit or tag, edit the clone command in app.yml: 
hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - git clone --branch v1.2.3 https://github.com/opennotes-ai/opennotes.git opennotes-discourse
Replace v1.2.3 with the desired tag. Remove the --branch flag to track main again.

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Migration notes

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Plugin settings

New settings added in an upgrade are not enabled automatically. After a rebuild, visit Admin > Settings > Plugins > Open Notes and review any settings that now appear with their defaults.

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Database migrations

The plugin does not run Alembic migrations — it stores state inside Discourse’s reviewables and post_custom_fields tables using the existing schema. No manual migration steps are needed between plugin versions.
If you downgrade to an older plugin version after a newer version has written new fields to reviewable_payload, the older code will ignore those fields gracefully — but any state recorded under the new schema will be lost on downgrade.

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Rolling back

To revert to a previous version, pin the --branch flag to the previous tag and rebuild: 
./launcher rebuild app
Discourse has no built-in container rollback. If a rebuild fails mid-way, ./launcher start app will start the last successfully built image.