We recognize that you need stability from the Angular framework. Stability ensures that reusable components and libraries, tutorials, tools, and learned practices don't become obsolete unexpectedly. Stability is essential for the ecosystem around Angular to thrive.
We also share with you the need for Angular to keep evolving. We strive to ensure that the foundation on top of which you are building is continuously improving and enabling you to stay up-to-date with the rest of the web ecosystem and your user needs.
This document contains the practices that we follow to provide you with a leading-edge application development platform, balanced with stability. We strive to ensure that future changes are always introduced in a predictable way. We want everyone who depends on Angular to know when and how new features are added, and to be well-prepared when obsolete ones are removed.
The practices described in this document apply to Angular 2.0 and later. If you are currently using AngularJS, see Upgrading from AngularJS. AngularJS is the name for all v1.x versions of Angular.
Angular version numbers indicate the level of changes that are introduced by the release. This use of semantic versioning helps you understand the potential impact of updating to a new version.
Angular version numbers have three parts: major.minor.patch. For example, version 7.2.11 indicates major version 7, minor version 2, and patch level 11.
The version number is incremented based on the level of change included in the release.
| Level of change | Details |
|---|---|
| Major release | Contains significant new features, some but minimal developer assistance is expected during the update. When updating to a new major release, you might need to run update scripts, refactor code, run additional tests, and learn new APIs. |
| Minor release | Contains new smaller features. Minor releases are fully backward-compatible; no developer assistance is expected during update, but you can optionally modify your applications and libraries to begin using new APIs, features, and capabilities that were added in the release. We update peer dependencies in minor versions by expanding the supported versions, but we do not require projects to update these dependencies. |
| Patch release | Low risk, bug fix release. No developer assistance is expected during update. |
NOTE: As of Angular version 7, the major versions of Angular core and the CLI are aligned. This means that in order to use the CLI as you develop an Angular app, the version of
@angular/coreand the CLI need to be the same.
You can ng update to any version of Angular, provided that the following criteria are met:
For example, you can update from version 11 to version 12, provided that version 12 is still supported. If you want to update across multiple major versions, perform each update one major version at a time. For example, to update from version 10 to version 12:
See Keeping Up-to-Date for more information about updating your Angular projects to the most recent version.
We let you preview what's coming by providing "Next" and Release Candidates (rc) pre-releases for each major and minor release:
| Pre-release type | Details |
|---|---|
| Next | The release that is under active development and testing. The next release is indicated by a release tag appended with the -next identifier, such as 8.1.0-next.0. |
| Release candidate | A release that is feature complete and in final testing. A release candidate is indicated by a release tag appended with the -rc identifier, such as version 8.1.0-rc.0. |
The latest next or rc pre-release version of the documentation is available at next.angular.io.
We work toward a regular schedule of releases, so that you can plan and coordinate your updates with the continuing evolution of Angular.
Dates are offered as general guidance and are subject to change.
In general, expect the following release cycle:
next or rc) build almost every weekThis cadence of releases gives eager developers access to new features as soon as they are fully developed and pass through our code review and integration testing processes, while maintaining the stability and reliability of the platform for production users that prefer to receive features after they have been validated by Google and other developers that use the pre-release builds.
Approximate dates are offered as general guidance and are subject to change.
| Version | Date |
|---|---|
| v16.1 | Week of 2023-06-12 |
| v16.2 | Week of 2023-07-24 |
| v17.0 | Week of 2023-11-06 |
All major releases are typically supported for 18 months.
| Support stage | Support Timing | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Active | 6 months | Regularly-scheduled updates and patches are released |
| Long-term (LTS) | 12 months | Only critical fixes and security patches are released |
The following table provides the status for Angular versions under support.
| Version | Status | Released | Active ends | LTS ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ^16.0.0 | Active | 2023-05-03 | 2023-11-03 | 2024-11-08 |
| ^15.0.0 | LTS | 2022-11-18 | 2023-05-03 | 2024-05-18 |
| ^14.0.0 | LTS | 2022-06-02 | 2022-11-18 | 2023-11-18 |
Angular versions v2 to v13 are no longer supported.
As a general rule, a fix is considered for an LTS version if it resolves one of:
Sometimes "breaking changes", such as the removal of support for select APIs and features, are necessary to innovate and stay current with new best practices, changing dependencies, or changes in the (web) platform itself.
To make these transitions as straightforward as possible, we make these commitments to you:
To help ensure that you have sufficient time and a clear path to update, this is our deprecation policy:
| Deprecation stages | Details |
|---|---|
| Announcement | We announce deprecated APIs and features in the change log. Deprecated APIs appear in the documentation with |
| Deprecation period | When an API or a feature is deprecated, it is still present in the next two major releases. After that, deprecated APIs and features are candidates for removal. A deprecation can be announced in any release, but the removal of a deprecated API or feature happens only in major release. Until a deprecated API or feature is removed, it is maintained according to the LTS support policy, meaning that only critical and security issues are fixed. |
| npm dependencies | We only make npm dependency updates that require changes to your applications in a major release. In minor releases, we update peer dependencies by expanding the supported versions, but we do not require projects to update these dependencies until a future major version. This means that during minor Angular releases, npm dependency updates within Angular applications and libraries are optional. |
Angular is a collection of many packages, subprojects, and tools. To prevent accidental use of private APIs and so that you can clearly understand what is covered by the practices described here — we document what is and is not considered our public API surface. For details, see Supported Public API Surface of Angular.
Any changes to the public API surface are done using the versioning, support, and depreciation policies previously described.
Occasionally we introduce new APIs under the label of "Developer Preview". These are APIs that are fully functional and polished, but that we are not ready to stabilize under our normal deprecation policy.
This may be because we want to gather feedback from real applications before stabilization, or because the associated documentation or migration tooling is not fully complete.
The policies and practices that are described in this document do not apply to APIs marked as Developer Preview. Such APIs can change at any time, even in new patch versions of the framework. Teams should decide for themselves whether the benefits of using Developer Preview APIs are worth the risk of breaking changes outside of our normal use of semantic versioning.
© 2010–2023 Google, Inc.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
https://angular.io/guide/releases