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Today (2nd May 2018) Magento released Magento CE 2.2.4. Recently the Magento Devs have been pretty busy pushing out 2.2.x updates and Magento 2 is maturing nicely. I am still getting to grips with Magento 2 and don’t expect to release a live site for at least another year so it makes sense to develop with the latest version of Magento. My Magento 2.2.x development environment is built on Docker and installing new Magento 2 dev shops is a breeze:

1. git clone https://github.com/gaiterjones/docker-magento2-2
2. cd docker-magento2-2/magento
3. edit .env
4. docker-compose build
5. docker-compose up -d
6. http://magento2.dev.com

Upgrading Magento is always a scary experience – Magento 2 is even more terrifying so I recommend you get used to doing updates with your dev systems. If you are manually upgrading from a previous 2.x version, you can use composer within the docker container:

1. Take a backup
2. Enter maintenance mode
3. edit compose.json
   1. change version
4. flush redis
   1. redis-cli flushall in the redis containers
5. composer update
6. rm -rf var/cache/* var/page_cache/* var/generation/* var/di/*
7. chmod +x bin/magento
8. php bin/magento cache:flush
9. php bin/magento setup:upgrade
10. php bin/magento indexer:reindex

If the upgrade breaks any sample data reinstall with php -f bin/magento sampledata:deploy

I regularly update my Magento 2 docker containers with each version update check them out at https://github.com/gaiterjones/docker-magento2-2