Meilisearch Dumpless Upgrades

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:54:33 -0400

Short one today.

I learned that Meilisearch has added experimental support for dumpless upgrades.

So far it works well, though to be fair none of my Meilisearch databases are particularly important.

I have one for better searches in Jellyfin and another for my Karakeep search index.

Losing either of them would be a minor inconvenience, whereas it’s been a massive inconvenience for me to have to dump and manually import every single time I patch Meilisearch.

You can either pass meilisearch the --experimental-dumpless-upgrade flag on the CLI, or set the MEILI_EXPERIMENTAL_DUMPLESS_UPGRADE environment variable.

In Docker you’d set it like this:

environment:
  - MEILI_EXPERIMENTAL_DUMPLESS_UPGRADE=true

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Meilisearch Dumpless Upgrades