Could not find property ‘alwaysExcludeVirtualFolder’

We recently had a new developer setup their local installation of a project which had been working for quite some time now. Everything went well, until their CM instance wouldn’t come up healthy. They saw the following in their log files:

Message: Could not find property 'alwaysExcludeVirtualFolder' on object of type: Sitecore.Links.UrlBuilders.DefaultItemUrlBuilderOptions
Source: Sitecore.Kernel
   at Sitecore.Configuration.DefaultFactory.AssignProperties(Object obj, Object[] properties)
   at Sitecore.Configuration.DefaultFactory.AssignProperties(XmlNode configNode,

A quick google though, brought up this SO article: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/35768/sitecore-10-3-error-after-security-bulletin-installation-could-not-find-propert. It’s basically a byproduct of upgrading from 10.3 to 10.3.1. But..we didn’t upgrade our project. We were still on 10.3.0. Well..most of us were. Looking at our .env file, we noticed the following line:

SITECORE_VERSION=10.3-ltsc2019

Is it possible that the new developer ninja-upgrading their instance? Yep.

Check out the Tag Manifest: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Sitecore/docker-images/master/tags/sitecore-tags.json

This is the tag for the version we were using:

{
     "Tag":  "10.3-ltsc2019",
     "Digest":  "sha256:e4de1099fd9a9ca20da8524d2e51500e7401b7abccc459ab1fc3e6bb427c2da1",
     "CreatedTime":  "12/01/2022 16:41:26",
     "LastUpdateTime":  "12/21/2023 00:08:33",
     "OSVersion":  "10.0.17763.5206",
     "TargetOS":  "ltsc2019",
     "Architecture":  "amd64",
     "OS":  "windows"
}

This is the one for 10.3.1:

{
     "Tag":  "10.3.1-ltsc2019",
     "Digest":  "sha256:e4de1099fd9a9ca20da8524d2e51500e7401b7abccc459ab1fc3e6bb427c2da1",
     "CreatedTime":  "08/01/2023 10:11:21",
     "LastUpdateTime":  "12/21/2023 00:08:14",
     "OSVersion":  "10.0.17763.5206",
     "TargetOS":  "ltsc2019",
     "Architecture":  "amd64",
     "OS":  "windows"
}

Notice the matching Digest values. They are for sure the same image. While I’d known in the back of my head that Sitecore did update these based on Semantic Versioning, it just never crossed my mind to force a patch version. I updated our .env file to look like this: