AppFolio Upgrade & Migration

Overview

AppFolio property management integrations depend on versioned REST API endpoints that evolve with the platform. Upgrades can rename fields on property and tenant objects, change pagination models, deprecate work-order endpoints, and alter the basic-auth flow. This skill detects your current API version, maps deprecated response shapes to replacements, and rolls back automatically if the new version fails.

Prerequisites

• Current API version prefix documented (e.g., /api/v1/)
• Access to the AppFolio API changelog and release notes
• Staging environment with test property and tenant data
• Client ID and secret stored in environment variables
• Existing integration test suite that covers core endpoints

Instructions

1. Run version detection to compare your active API version against the latest.
2. Review the AppFolio changelog for breaking changes between the two versions.
3. Apply schema migration transforms to property and tenant response objects.
4. Update endpoint URLs from the old version prefix to the new one.
5. Switch pagination from offset to cursor-based if required by the new version.
6. Run the smoke test suite against staging to verify all endpoints respond.
7. Deploy to production with the rollback strategy enabled.
8. Monitor error logs for 410/401 responses indicating missed migration steps.

Output

After a successful migration the skill produces:

• A VersionInfo object confirming current, latest, and deprecated versions
• Transformed property and tenant objects matching the new schema
• Smoke test results for properties, tenants, work orders, and accounting endpoints
• Rollback log entries if any endpoint fell back to the previous version

Version Detection

interface VersionInfo { current: string; latest: string; deprecated: string[]; }

async function detectApiVersion(baseUrl: string, headers: Record<string, string>): Promise<VersionInfo> {
  const res = await fetch(`${baseUrl}/api/status`, { headers });
  const body = await res.json();
  const current = res.headers.get("X-AppFolio-Api-Version") ?? body.api_version;
  const deprecated: string[] = body.deprecated_versions ?? [];
  if (deprecated.includes(current)) {
    console.warn(`Version ${current} is deprecated. Migrate to ${body.latest_version}.`);
  }
  return { current, latest: body.latest_version, deprecated };
}

Schema Migration

interface LegacyProperty { address_line1: string; unit_count: number; mgr_id: string; }
interface CurrentProperty { street_address: string; total_units: number; manager_id: string; }

function migrateProperty(old: LegacyProperty): CurrentProperty {
  return { street_address: old.address_line1, total_units: old.unit_count, manager_id: old.mgr_id };
}

interface LegacyTenant { lease_end: string; balance_due: number; }
interface CurrentTenant { lease_expiry_date: string; outstanding_balance: number; }

function migrateTenant(old: LegacyTenant): CurrentTenant {
  return { lease_expiry_date: old.lease_end, outstanding_balance: old.balance_due };
}

Rollback Strategy

async function versionAwareRequest(
  baseUrl: string, path: string, headers: Record<string, string>,
  targetVersion: string, fallbackVersion: string
): Promise<any> {
  const res = await fetch(`${baseUrl}/api/${targetVersion}${path}`, { headers });
  if (res.status === 410 || res.status === 404) {
    console.warn(`${targetVersion} rejected; falling back to ${fallbackVersion}`);
    const fallback = await fetch(`${baseUrl}/api/${fallbackVersion}${path}`, { headers });
    if (!fallback.ok) throw new Error(`Fallback failed: ${fallback.status}`);
    return fallback.json();
  }
  if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${res.status}`);
  return res.json();
}

Examples

// Detect version and migrate if needed
const info = await detectApiVersion("https://acme.appfolio.com", authHeaders);
if (info.deprecated.includes(info.current)) {
  const oldProps = await fetchLegacyProperties();
  const migrated = oldProps.map(migrateProperty);
  await smokeTestEndpoints("https://acme.appfolio.com", authHeaders);
}

Error Handling

Migration Issue	Symptom	Fix
Deprecated version prefix	410 Gone on every request	Update base URL to latest version prefix
Renamed property fields	undefined values in property sync	Apply migrateProperty transform
Removed pagination offset	Empty result sets after page one	Switch to cursor-based pagination
Auth header rejected	401 Unauthorized after upgrade	Regenerate client secret, update env vars
Webhook envelope change	Event handler parse errors	Update payload parser for new envelope

Resources

• AppFolio Stack APIs
• AppFolio Engineering Blog
• See appfolio-ci-integration for post-migration CI validation