Obviously there are general upgrade guides provided by Ember team and many fellow bloggers. This is just to document one of the experiences with upgrading from ember 1.7.0 to 1.13.13.

At the moment of this writing Ember latest stable version is 2.8. My team was one of the early adopters of Ember. I believe the team started incorporating it in late 2013, which is very soon after the 1.0 release. We went live with the version 1.7 at the beginning of 2015 and since that time we didn’t do any updates for “penny wise and pound foolish” reasons.

Upgrade itself was a bit of pain as it spread for couple of months. We allocated few days per sprint and at the same time continued developing new features the old way in other branches. Bad idea.

Another pain was that we adopted Ember Data while it was still beta. As a result we have custom code altering adapter’s and serializer’s behaviour. There are many breaking changes between beta versions of Ember Data, so using it while in beta was a very bad idea.

One of great things about being on Ember 1.13.13 version is that you are effectively on 2.0.0 version unless you have deprecation messages in your console. This also means that you can still release your application with some parts not being completely converted to the new way of doing things. ember.prod.js doesn’t generate warnings and works just fine. I really like the way Ember tries to make upgrading easy. Here is a nice write up on handling deprecations as of 2.3.0.

List of useful links:

• Ember 1.x Change Log
• Ember Data 1.x Change Log
• The Road to Ember 2.0 and some Slides
• Deprecations Guide for Ember 1.x

Gotcha list:

This list is composed from notes I took so it is not very well organized and does not contain all of the items we had to fix.

When upgrading from 1.7 to 1.8

• Update ember data to 1.0.0-beta.11 for compatibility and as a fix for “Ember Data cannot read property 'async' of undefined"
• Replace pushObject with addRecord to fix “You looked up the relationship on a with id but some of the associated records were not loaded.”
• This does not work and has to be rewritten Ember.Handlebars.helpers.render.call(this, name, contextString, options)
• Use Ember.set() whenever there was controller.isNew property with some set

When upgrading from 1.8 to 1.10.1

• Start using HTMLBars instead of Handlebars by incorporating ember-template-compiler
• add stripBOM to grunt file… as template compiler includes those: template = template.replace(/\uFEFF/g, ''); // remove BOM
• Fix HTML to be correct (closing tags, missing tbody, etc)
• ember-data 1.0.0-beta.11 has bug in findQuery asserts => upgrade ember-data to 1.0.0.beta12
• Remove //# sourceMappingURL=ember-data.js.map
• Ensure models are generated with {async: false}
• Remove code that works with MetamorphView. Fixes this: Assertion Failed: A fragment cannot be pushed into a buffer that contains content because of: view.createChildView(Ember._MetamorphView, {

When upgrading from 1.10.1 to 1.11.4

At this point you start to get tons of deprecation messages.

• You attempted to access `someProperty` from `<App.SomeXyzController:ember2661>`, but object proxying is deprecated. Please use `model.someProperty` instead.
• Convert this {{action bubbles=false preventDefault=false}} to this {{action "ok" "close" "cancel" bubbles=false preventDefault=false}}
• Fix dynamic compilation of HTMLBars. Cannot call `compile` without the template compiler loaded. Please load `ember-template-compiler.js` prior to calling `compile`. Ember.HTMLBars.compile(submitHtmlTemplate); doesn’t produce a correct function to retrieve HTML. Can be solved as in this SO answer.
• Using @each at the end of a computed key is deprecated and will not work in Ember 2.0
• Replace Ember.Enumerable.mapProperty with mapBy
• Replace Ember.Handlebars.helper with Ember.Helper.helper

When upgrading from 1.11.4 to 1.13.13

• Rewrite code that uses itemController
• Rewrite properties that have setter to the new computed syntax

I hope this comes in handy for you.