Launch update

[Kriti Godey]

Hi everyone,

We are on track to launch on Thursday. Here’s where we are:

• Users & permissions QA is done with no issues found
• Upgrades QA is done with all issues fixed and tested
• We have a “refresh DB” button in the DB page, thanks to Sean’s quick work.
• Installing Mathesar with a new DB is working smoothly and is pretty user-friendly thanks to hard work by Brent & Mukesh
• Deployment type 2 has some reported issues, but should also be mostly working.
• Release process is mostly finalized; waiting for Brent’s review.

Priorities

I’ve moved the launch check in to Thursday. We’ll discuss the launch publicity plan etc. then.

Mukesh, Brent, and I are the only ones working on the remaining tasks. Here are the priorities. We are going to freeze and cut the release tomorrow, so whatever doesn’t make it by then won’t be part of the release.

Mukesh

1. Complete https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2585
2. Review https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/pull/2579 and https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/pull/2584 or move them out of launch if it’s not needed.
3. Complete https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2570
4. Demo load balancer work

Brent

1. Review release process
2. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2599
3. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2604
4. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2593
5. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2586

Kriti

1. Finalize release process
2. Complete and merge https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2589
3. Merge https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar-website/pull/67
4. Write HN post
5. Cut release

Everyone

Is there anything else we need to do for launch, or do you have questions or concerns?

[Kriti Godey]

Mukesh & Brent: Please add reviewing my PR to your list: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/pull/2601

[Brent Moran]

Regarding the release process:

I made a few changes, mostly around details of how to modify the
documentation and `install.sh` for the release.

I think we're already clear on this, but to reiterate:
We currently don't have the ability to use anything but the `latest`
docker tag for our `docker-compose.yml` file in order to support
upgrading with watchtower. This implies a 'release' is really just the
`install.sh` and `docker-compose.yml` scripts on github, and when the
script is actually run it will always try to use the newest docker
images. We should improve this situation ASAP.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

I'm not certain this belongs in this mail thread, it's a reply to Brent's recent email.

> We should improve this situation ASAP.

I don't think we need this for the launch but I agree that this needs to be done ASAP. I wanted to document my approach here.

I did the following changes to my install.sh and docker-compose.yml files in order to do repeated upgrade tests yesterday after the latest image push. These changes pull the specified version of images, tags them as latest, and builds and runs the container with the latest tag. This ensures that watchtower identifies the tag as latest and performs upgrades as expected.

1. Create an additional .install-env file which contains all existing variables along with an additional variable: MATHESAR_VERSION='${mathesar_version}'.

2. The docker commands in install.sh are updated as follows:

docker compose --env-file .install-env --profile prod pull 

docker tag mathesar/mathesar-prod:"${mathesar_version}" mathesar/mathesar-prod:latest 

docker compose --profile prod up -d --wait --no-recreate --no-build || installation_fail

3. The images within docker-compose.yml are updated as follows:

 image: "mathesar/mathesar-prod:${MATHESAR_VERSION-latest}"

Change 1 creates an additional file because I couldn't find a way to pass env variables directly as part of the command to `docker compose pull`.

Change 2 pulls the images using the additional .install-env file, tags the prod image as latest, and then builds and starts the containers with the default .env file.

Change 3 is to ensure that docker-compose.yml uses the version mentioned in the MATHESAR_VERSION env variable.

We could delete the .install-env file once this completes.

These are crude and can be improved, but I've tested this approach a few times, so I can ensure that this works (at least in my local environment).

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Update:

Please ignore the `--no-recreate --no-build` arguments in command 3 (docker compose up) within Change 2. This was a local test change I forgot to remove in the previous email.