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OJS does not define its own lifecycle commands. Like every application plugin, an OJS stack is built, started, stopped, inspected, and rolled out with the core sitectl commands, which operate on whichever context is active:
The downstream Dockerfile builds from libops/ojs:3.5.0-5-php84; that published image already contains the matching OJS release. sitectl deploy pulls dependency images and rebuilds the downstream customization layer while the current stack is still online. After stopping it, deploy starts only OJS and its required Compose dependencies, waits up to 5 minutes for the installation marker, and runs the supported php tools/upgrade.php upgrade migration. A migration failure fails the deploy; only a successful migration is followed by the full-stack start and bounded 10-minute health wait. Before changing the OJS base version, back up MariaDB and the user-owned ojs-files and ojs-public named volumes. Core sitectl can create the database backup:
Archive and test restoration of both OJS named volumes with your Docker-volume backup procedure; a database dump alone does not contain uploaded or public files. The OJS plugin does not register the generic dev-mode component. Mounting a whole OJS plugin category from a mostly empty checkout would hide plugins bundled in the versioned base image. Add custom plugins through the tracked downstream build context, or create an explicit override that mounts only one named custom plugin directory. sitectl ojs ... is reserved for OJS-specific operations, including the PHP tools, PKP tools, and related helpers. General lifecycle stays in the core CLI so the same operational contract applies to every stack. See sitectl create, sitectl compose, and sitectl deploy for the full lifecycle reference.