In general, upgrading Substrate is a matter of replacing the Substrate binaries and re-running certain of the bootstrapping and account creation commands. The most thorough upgrade requires that you run the following after replacing the binaries:

1. substrate-bootstrap-management-account
2. substrate-bootstrap-network-account
3. substrate-bootstrap-deploy-account
4. substrate-create-admin-account for each of your admin accounts
5. substrate-create-account for each of your other accounts

Release notes will endeavor to call out specific of these steps that are necessary to gain access to new features. Others remain recommended, of course.

Upgrade compatibility is only guaranteed from one month to the next so it's important to stay up-to-date. Behavior of upgrading several versions in one step is undefined and may not function properly.

Upgrade notes by release

2021.01

You must run substrate-create-admin-account for each of your admin accounts before you'll be able to use eval $(substrate-credentials) to streamline your use of the Credential Factory.

2020.12

You must run substrate-bootstrap-management-account in order to re-tag your former master account as your management account. (This rename follows AWS' own renaming.)