I poked around and didn’t see anyone asking this specific question (but I have to assume this is a common scenario).
We’ve been building on Trellis now for 2 years. The older WordPress websites that we still manage usually require us to extract all “App” contents from that build and clone a current version of Trellis in order for everything to work as expected on our local development environments. This then results in us provisioning a new server and re-launching the website.
Is this to be expected – or is there a much better way to upgrade Trellis?
Depends on the changes I’d say. If it’s a change marked as [BREAKING] then definitely it’s safest to provision a new server. If for example we changed the template of an Nginx config file, it’s likely fine to re-provision an existing server.
We don’t really provide that information beyond [BREAKING] so it’s a bit of a judgement call. All that being said, provisioning a new server is a great habit anyway in my opinion. It’s what we do for the roots.io site. It can be heavy-handed and take more time, but it’s safest in the long run.