Update Channels

Quern ships on two channels. stable is the default and tracks tagged releases. beta is opt-in, and gets the same content earlier — usually days to a couple of weeks ahead — so problems are found before they reach everyone.

If you never think about channels, you are on stable, and that is the right place to be.

Which channel am I on?

quern set-channel

With no argument it prints the current channel and the branch it tracks, plus the valid names:

Current update channel: stable (tracks origin/release/stable)
Valid channels: stable, beta

You can also just ask Claude — “what’s my Quern channel?” — since the channel and update status come back with ensure_server in the normal course of a session.

Switching to beta

quern set-channel beta
quern update

Both steps are needed. set-channel writes your preference to ~/.quern/config.json and nothing else: it does not switch branches, download anything, or change the running server. The next quern update is what actually moves you.

What that update does depends on how you installed Quern:

• Installed with the install script (tarball): the updater takes whichever GitHub Release is the newest one marked as a prerelease. If there are no prereleases at the moment, it falls back to the latest stable, so you are never served older content than a stable user.

• Installed as a git clone: your checkout has to be on the branch your channel tracks — release/beta for beta. Any other branch, including main, is treated the same way: quern update tells you how far ahead the release branch is, prints the exact git checkout to run, and applies nothing.

  git checkout release/beta
  quern update

  It will not move your workspace for you, by design — silently switching branches under someone’s uncommitted work is not a trade Quern makes.

Switching back

quern set-channel stable
quern update

On a tarball install that is all of it. On a git clone you also have to move the checkout back, because set-channel changes your preference and nothing else — a clone left sitting on release/beta will keep being told it is on the wrong branch rather than being returned to stable:

quern set-channel stable
git checkout release/stable
quern update

Stable is always a safe target: stable releases are cut from content that has already been through beta, so going back does not mean losing fixes you were relying on.

What to expect on beta

Beta is where a release is checked against real projects before it is tagged. In practice that means you see fixes sooner and you are the one who finds anything that was missed. If you use Quern daily on work you care about, stable is the better default. If you would rather catch a regression early — and are willing to report it — beta is genuinely useful, and switching back takes two commands.

The daily update notice respects your channel, so on beta it tells you about beta releases rather than nagging you toward stable.