Upgrading Django to 1.8

Jun 06, 2015

As they said, having last version has several benefits:

New features and improvements are added.
Bugs are fixed.
Older version of Django will eventually no longer receive security updates.
Upgrading as each new Django release is available makes future upgrades less painful by keeping your code base up to date.

Also it's even greater that 1.8 is a LTS (Long-term support), that means we will get bug fixes and security updates for a guaranteed period of time, typically 3+ years.

How the upgrade has affected to some Django 1.4 production code?, hard to say in few words, it depends on how the code is (+ 3rd party pieces), but main spots - to take it carefully - I've noted were:

Changes in how settings are organized, take a look to your settings and try to split it in environment files (tsd example).
Migration tool is now builtin (not depending on South any more since 1.7), take care while migrating between migrating tool :P.
I've never used URL's with namespaces before ({% url 'namespace:view' %}). It's a nice feature available in 1.4 too (didn't know) if you pretend to reuse an app in more than a project.
In urls.py django.conf.urls.default is becoming in django.conf.urls (from 1.6).
Cache key is now the ABSOLUTE URL (full request required to set/get a key).
ManyToMany field warning related to the stupid null=True.
Query filtering by datetime has changed a bit.
Changes in wsgi and gunicorn files (not using gunicorn_django any more).
Don't forget to enable ALLOWED_HOSTS in your production settings (from 1.7).

It would be very tough if this above points pretend to be a guide or something like that. Not by a long shot. My recommendation is - of course - take a cup of your favourite drink, a bunch of patience... start reading the release notes and, above all, have as much fun as you can :).