How to update openwebrx

The steps to update an existing installation of OpenWebRX depend on the method of installation that was used for the initial installation.

You may encounter problems with the client frontend immediately after an update. This is typically caused by caching, so please clear your browser cache in that case. This also applies to any intermediate caches, for example reverse proxies. The problems should clear itself, too, as the cache contents expire over the course of a few hours.

Installations using the OpenWebRX repositories (including Raspberry Pi images)

When using the OpenWebRX repository, the update procedure is the same as for other software packages on the system.

The simplest way typically involves these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openwebrx

Other options, such as apt-get upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade should work as well. Please consult your package manager documentation for details and differences.

Please note that recommended packages will not be automatically installed when upgrading an existing installation, so if you are missing optional functionality after an update, please install the corresponding packages accordingly.

With OpenWebRX 1.1.0, this affects the newly-introduced codecserver package, as well as the digiham package that was not installable for some time.

Installations using Docker

The typical update procedure for a docker container is to pull the new image from the Docker hub and then re-creating the container, usually with the same parameters.

This helper script can perform these steps whenever you call it. You may need to modify the parameters to the docker run command to suit your needs:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

TAG=stable

docker pull jketterl/openwebrx:${TAG}
docker stop openwebrx || true
docker rm openwebrx || true
docker run --name openwebrx -d --restart=unless-stopped --device /dev/bus/usb --tmpfs=/tmp/openwebrx -p 8073:8073 -v openwebrx-config:/etc/openwebrx -v openwebrx-settings:/var/lib/openwebrx jketterl/openwebrx:${TAG}

It also allows you to switch between different tags (e.g. from stable to latest) by simply changing the TAG variable.

Manual installation method

Installations that have been set up according to the manual installation procedure will need to re-visit the instructions and manually update the components of the installation individually. Most steps of the procedure should give you a new version by simply repeating them.

OpenWebRX itself can be updated using the git version control software. For most cases, git pull should give you the latest version. You may need to switch to a different branch or tag using git checkout depending on your intentions. You may additionally need to resolve potential conflicts that may arise if any of the files of the checkout were modified.