Don't Let Breaking Changes Break Your Heart

Valentine's Day is upon us, and for some, hearts aren’t all that’s breaking. While an update to Directus is usually something to celebrate, occasionally, a minor change can result in an annoying break in your project.

“Breaking changes” can be extremely frustrating, especially if you’ve spent months making your project perfect, and it’s functioning exactly how you want it to. That’s why we try to avoid breaking changes as much as possible.

While some changes are necessary and may be inconvenient, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

A breaking change can actually help you discover ways to enhance your project while taking advantage of important updates and fixes to our platform.

What’s considered a breaking change?

For those of you who’ve never had your app broken, a breaking change is a change in a software system that can cause other components to fail.

Occasionally, implementing new features or updates means you have to update the underlying software design. If you’re using Directus, and a change we make to the platform causes a problem with your project, you might have to modify your code.

Keep in mind, breaking changes don’t have to be big – they can be any small update or fix.

For example, someone relying on CSS overrides could be impacted by a renamed ID in an html element, because it broke their setup. Or, perhaps the default or accepted values on an API parameter changed.

How do we determine if a change is a breaking one? We follow the same 80/20 rule as we do for deciding on features to implement: If 80% or more of our users are affected by a potential change and have to adjust something in their project, we consider it a “breaking change.”

Change is progress

Directus is a labor of love, and we count on our thriving user community to help us to continually work to enhance the platform.

Every breaking change comes with benefits that outweigh the drawbacks. And, if you’ve been a member of the Directus community for a while now, you know that when there is a breaking change of any sort, we provide you with explicit documentation.

Of course, we’ll always communicate with you in advance regarding any upcoming changes, and give you ample time to prepare. We’re here for and because of you, and we’ll continue to support you as you build out your amazing projects.

Have any suggestions or feedback about updates or fixes to Directus? We’d love to hear it! Reach out to us, or ping us on Discord.