We recommend upgrading straight to 4.8, as we improved how we handle translations in 4.8. This also means easier database migration, especially if you have a big product catalog.
If you’re on an older version than 4.4 please follow previous upgrade guides and perform those upgrades incrementally, eg.
  1. upgrade 4.1 to 4.2
  2. upgrade 4.2 to 4.3
  3. upgrade 4.3 to 4.4

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Upgrade Rails

Rails 6.0 is no longer supported - if you haven’t already, you’ll need to upgrade to Rails 6.1 or 7.x.
The effort to upgrade to Rails 6.1 is relatively low and brings a lot of improvements around ActiveStorage and handling of CDNs. See the Rails docs for upgrading from 6.0 to 6.1, and for upgrading from 6.1 to 7.0.
If using Rails 7, you will need to install libvips on your cloud environment, as Rails 7 uses vips as its default variant processor. You can still use imagemagick, but you’ll need to manually set it in your Rails config.

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Rails 7 specific changes

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Update Spree Config

If you’re upgrading your app to Rails 7, you’ll need to make a slight update to your spree config initializer. In config/initializers/spree.rb, wrap the Spree.config block in a Rails.application.config.after_initialize block, like so: 
Rails.application.config.after_initialize do
  Spree.config do |config|
    # config settings initialized here
  end
end
If you don’t perform this update to the code, you may expect to get the following error: 
/lib/spree/core/preferences/store.rb:96:in `should_persist?': 
uninitialized constant Spree::Preference (NameError)

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Update other initializers

Just like with Spree::Config, you may need to update other intializers in your application, that use autoloadable constants. For example, if you use spree_auth_devise, you’ll need to update config/initializers/devise.rb and wrap the configuration in Rails.application.config.after_initialize block: 
Rails.application.config.after_initialize do
  if defined?(Spree::Auth)
    Spree::Auth::Config.signout_after_password_change = false
  end
end

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Update gems

Run the following command to update your gems to 4.4: 
bundle update
Legacy REST API v1 was extracted from the spree gem in 4.4. If your application depends on the Spree v1 API, you’ll have to include it as a gem in your Gemfile: 
bundle add spree_api_v1

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Install missing migrations

bin/rake spree:install:migrations

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Run migrations

bin/rails db:migrate

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Run Additional Commands for Frontend

If using Spree Frontend, run the following additional commands to get everything set up correctly with the updated gems: 
bin/rails g spree:frontend:install

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Read the release notes

For information about changes contained within this release, please read the Spree 4.5.0 Release Notes.