Upgrading Storybook

The frontend ecosystem is a fast-moving place. Regular dependency upgrades are a way of life, whether upgrading a framework, library, tooling, or all of the above! Storybook provides a few resources to help ease the pain of upgrading.

Upgrade script

The most common upgrade is Storybook itself. Storybook releases follow Semantic Versioning. We publish patch releases with bug fixes continuously, minor versions of Storybook with new features every few months, and major versions of Storybook with breaking changes roughly once per year.

To help ease the pain of keeping Storybook up-to-date, we provide a command-line script:

npx storybook upgrade

This upgrades all of the Storybook packages in your project to the latest stable version, perform confidence checks of your package versions, and checks for opportunities to run automigrations to update your configuration automatically.

Automigrate script

Storybook upgrades are not the only thing to consider: changes in the ecosystem also present challenges. For example, lots of frameworks (Angular 12, Create React App v5, NextJS) have recently migrated from Webpack 4 to Webpack 5, so even if you don't upgrade your Storybook version, you might need to update your configuration accordingly. That's what Automigrate is for:

npx storybook@next automigrate

It runs a set of standard configuration checks, explains what is potentially out-of-date, and offers to fix it for you automatically. It also points to the relevant documentation so you can learn more. It runs automatically as part of storybook upgrade command, but it's also available on its own if you don't want to upgrade Storybook.

Prereleases

In addition to the above, Storybook is under constant development, and we publish pre-release versions almost daily. Pre-releases are the best way to try out new features before they are generally available, and we do our best to keep them as stable as possible, although this is not always possible.

To upgrade to the latest pre-release:

npx storybook@next upgrade --prerelease

If you'd like to downgrade to a stable version, manually edit the package version numbers in your package.json and re-install.