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What maintenance?! I just bump the docker-compose.yml version numbers and Stop/Start the service. It's very painless... My cellphone has more frequent updates t

• KronisLV 5y ago
  If you do that with minor versions, you should generally be fine. When you need to upgrade across major versions, you'll most likely be met with the following in case you haven't followed the updates closely: > It seems you are upgrading from major version X to major version Y. > It is required to upgrade to the latest Y.0.x version first before proceeding. > Please follow the upgrade documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/index.html#upgrading-to-a-new-major-version https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/index.html#upgrading-to-a-... In addition to that, you should NEVER just bump versions without having backups (which you've hopefully considered), so there is probably another step in there, either validating that your latest automatic backups work, or even just manually copying the current GitLab data directory into another folder, in the case of an Omnibus install, or doing the same manually for all components in the more distributed installation type. Disclaimer: this has little do to with GitLab in particular but is something you should consider with any and all software packages that you upgrade, especially the kind with non-trivial dependencies and data storage mechanisms, like PostgreSQL. Of course, you can always dump the DB but it's easier to back up everything else as well by taking the instances offline and making data copies of all container volumes/bind mounts.
  • tenken 5y ago
    * I never skip (minor) versions. * I have automated backups created every 2 days stored via S3, I've done a full restore twice in 5+ years of uptime. * I run Gitlab at home and at work. None of the points touch on a maintenance burden ... Just saying. Skipping versions while updating any software is just being a lazy sysadmin and praying it works. Typically skipping to major versions during upgrades always comes with breaking changes so operator beware.
    • KronisLV 5y ago
      > Skipping versions while updating any software is just being a lazy sysadmin and praying it works. Typically skipping to major versions during upgrades always comes with breaking changes so operator beware. It's nice that GitLab actually prevent you from doing that and give you messages that it's unsupported and direct you to their documentation, which describes the supported upgrade paths... However, at the same time one cannot help but to wonder about why you can't go from version #1 to version #999 in one go. Most of the software at my dayjob (at least the one that i've written) absolutely can do that - since the DB migrations are fully automated, even if i had to create a lot of pushback against other devs going: "Well, it would be easier just to tell the clients who are running this software to just do X manually when going from version Y to Z." But GitLab's updates are largely automated (the Chef scripts and PostgreSQL migrations etc.), it's just that for some reason they either don't include all of them or require that you visit certain key points throughout the process, which cannot be skipped (e.g. certain milestone releases, as described in their docs). Of course, i acknowledge that it's extremely hard to sustain backwards compatibility and i've seen numerous projects start out that way and the devs give up on the idea at first sign of difficulty, since it's not like they care much for that and it doesn't always lead to clear value add - it's a nice to have and they won't earn any less of a salary for making some ops' person's life harder down the line. I also have automated backups with BackupPC, however i expect software to remain reasonably secure and stable without having to update that often - props to GitLab for disclosing the important releases, but i'm migrating over to Gitea for my personal needs as we speak, even if having someone else manage a GitLab install at work is still like having a superpower (with GitLab CI, GitLab Registry etc.). I actually wrote an article about how really frequent updates cause problems and lots of churn: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/never-update-anything https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/never-update-anything (though the title is a bit tongue in cheek, as explained by the disclaimer at the top of the article).
      • tenken 5y ago
        Your db migrations may support updates from #1 to #99 but your OS does not directly support updates of MySQL 5 to MySQL 8 with issues. For example there are plenty of examples of deprecated my.cnf configuration values. Similarly APT on Ubuntu will prompt how to handle a my.cnf that differs from the Distribution release when upgrading Versions. Often times this is more painful than minor version updates. I think the version milestones in Gitlab are akin to dependency changes for self-hosted Gitlab. An example is the Gitlab v9 (?) Postgres upgrade to Postgres v11 I think, it was opt-in for a prior version of Gitlab than required at that version milestone. It's difficult to make db migration scripts for Gitlab,as in your example, that may depend on newer Postgres idioms not available in the legacy db version. So you can't simply support gitlab updates from X to Y version due to underlyng dependency constraints... Thanks for the insightful discourse.