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Updating Contracts

NEAR accounts separate their logic (contract's code) from their state (storage), allowing the code to be changed.

Contract's can be updated in two ways:

  1. Through tools such as NEAR CLI or near-api-js (if you hold the account's full access key).
  2. Programmatically, by implementing a method that takes the new code and deploys it.

Updating Through Toolsโ€‹

Simply re-deploy another contract using your preferred tool, for example, using NEAR CLI:

# (optional) If you don't have an account, create one
near create-account <account-id> --useFaucet

# Deploy the contract
near deploy <account-id> <wasm-file>

Programmatic Updateโ€‹

A smart contract can also update itself by implementing a method that:

  1. Takes the new wasm contract as input
  2. Creates a Promise to deploy it on itself

How to Invoke Such Method?โ€‹

# Load the contract's raw bytes
CONTRACT_BYTES=`cat ./path/to/wasm.wasm | base64`

# Call the update_contract method
near call <contract-account> update_contract "$CONTRACT_BYTES" --base64 --accountId <manager-account> --gas 300000000000000
DAO Factories

This is how DAO factories update their contracts

Migrating the Stateโ€‹

Since the account's logic (smart contract) is separated from the account's state (storage), the account's state persists when re-deploying a contract.

Because of this, adding methods or modifying existing ones will yield no problems.

However, deploying a contract that modifies or removes structures stored in the state will raise an error: Cannot deserialize the contract state, in which case you can choose to:

  1. Use a different account
  2. Rollback to the previous contract code
  3. Add a method to migrate the contract's state

The Migration Methodโ€‹

If you have no option but to migrate the state, then you need to implement a method that:

  1. Reads the current state of the contract
  2. Applies different functions to transform it into the new state
  3. Returns the new state
DAO Update

This is how DAOs update themselves

Example: Guest Book Migrationโ€‹

Imagine you have a Guest Book where you store messages, and the users can pay for such messages to be "premium". You keep track of the messages and payments using the following state:

Update Contractโ€‹

At some point you realize that you could keep track of the payments inside of the PostedMessage itself, so you change the contract to:

Incompatible Statesโ€‹

If you deploy the update into an initialized account the contract will fail to deserialize the account's state, because:

  1. There is an extra payments vector saved in the state (from the previous contract)
  2. The stored PostedMessages are missing the payment field (as in the previous contract)

Migrating the Stateโ€‹

To fix the problem, you need to implement a method that goes through the old state, removes the payments vector and adds the information to the PostedMessages:

Notice that migrate is actually an initialization method that ignores the existing state ([#init(ignore_state)]), thus being able to execute and rewrite the state.

tip

You can follow a migration step by step in the official migration example Javascript migration example testfile can be found on here: test-basic-updates.ava.js, run by this command: pnpm run test:basic-update in examples directory.

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