Many hosting environments allow you to update Craft using the Craft Control Panel directly within your staging or production environments.
However, this is generally considered bad practice as it makes it very difficult to keep your local, staging and production environments in sync.
As well as being bad practice, updating Craft within staging and production is incompatible with load balanced environments like Servd. Your update request will only run on one of potentially many running instances of your application, leaving each of them in an incompatible state.
For these reasons Servd requires users to follow a uni-direction development flow, starting with local development where installing plugins is fine.
Update Craft Locally
Get your project up and running in a local development environment. This might be ddev, Docker or MAMP. Any of these are fine as long as your Craft project is running on your local machine.
Using the Craft Control Panel, or `composer` on the command line, update Craft.
Using `git` on the command line, or a visual git client, check to make sure your composer.json and composer.lock files (and optionally your project config files) have been updated and are ready to be committed.
Create a new commit and push your git repo.
Build a new bundle in Servd from your new commit and deploy it to one of your environments.
Craft is now updated!
Upgrading Major Versions of Craft
If you're looking to update the major version of your site (e.g. from v3 to v4, or v4 to v5), we've got some handy guides here that might help: