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Monad publishes the daemon, CLI, and Web UI together as one versioned build, on three channels: stable by default, beta for prereleases, and nightly for the tip of main. Which build to run, how to move between channels, and what compatibility you can expect. The contributor-facing side of this — how releases are cut — is in CONTRIBUTING.md.

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Channels

Nightly has no release PR or CHANGELOG.md update, but its GitHub release contains generated notes for the exact commit range. It is main as it stands — use it when you want the newest work and can tolerate a broken day. Each dist installer is bound to its release tag. Install stable with the latest installer, then switch an existing install explicitly when needed:

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Upgrading

The CLI and Web UI resolve the selected channel to one exact immutable GitHub release, verify the installer and platform archive against GitHub’s asset digests, then run the same upgrade worker. The worker exits the daemon before replacing the executable and restarts it when it was previously running. --tag and --channel are mutually exclusive. Exact tags are intentional operations and may downgrade the installation; --force still uses the release checksum and only bypasses the same-version check. Your configuration and data are untouched by an upgrade: the installer leaves an existing ~/.monad in place.

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Versioning and compatibility

Monad is pre-1.0. Versions follow Semantic Versioning, which before 1.0.0 means a minor bump may carry a breaking change. Conventional Commits drive the version bump and the generated changelog, so a breaking change is always marked with ! and a BREAKING CHANGE: footer in history and release notes. Practical expectations while pre-1.0:
  • Read the release notes before a minor upgrade. That is where a required migration is announced (for example the auth.json v1 → v2 credential change, which fails startup rather than guessing).
  • The daemon and its clients should match. The CLI warns on a daemon/client version mismatch; --force continues past it on remote connections at your own risk.
  • On-disk formats may move. Settings files are versioned and validated at load; a format the running daemon does not understand is rejected loudly, never silently reinterpreted.
  • The wire contracts are the stable-ish part. Every method and stream is declared once in @monad/protocol and covered by parity tests, so a client built on those packages moves with the daemon. See api.md.

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Supported versions

Security fixes go to main and the latest release only; older releases are not patched. Upgrade before reporting a vulnerability. Full policy: SECURITY.md.

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Verifying a download

Immutable releases include signed attestations for every asset. For manual installation and release verification, see the README.