Upgrading version of GoCD

[Tim Stevens]

Hello, newbie here again.  I have a couple of questions that I need help with:

1. Are the downloadable installers upgrade installers?  Meaning I can upgrade the existing instance of the product without issues, or well with few issues :)
2. I would like to upgrade from v20.4.0 to the latest version.  Is there any documentation about breaking fixes, or am I safe to make the upgrade?  
3. If I upgrade, do the agents need to be upgraded too?

Thank in advance!

[Chad Wilson]

Hi Tim

On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 11:02 PM Tim Stevens <timi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, newbie here again.  I have a couple of questions that I need help with:

1. Are the downloadable installers upgrade installers?  Meaning I can upgrade the existing instance of the product without issues, or well with few issues :)

Generally speaking, yes. But you should take a backup first. :-)

https://docs.gocd.org/current/installation/upgrading_go.html 

 

1. I would like to upgrade from v20.4.0 to the latest version.  Is there any documentation about breaking fixes, or am I safe to make the upgrade?  

Check through the release notes. GoCD doesn't use Semver, so you should probably review each version.

https://www.gocd.org/releases/

There's a one-time manual database migration that needs to be done for 20.5.0 - which is possibly why you are at 20.4.0 :-)

Generally speaking, I would say you are probably recommended to go 20.4.0 -> 20.5.0, ensure it is stable after database migration and then you can probably go straight to 22.1.0 (just because there have not been major changes in 2021) - but I would review the changelogs for your specific case.

You may also want to look at the thread alongside https://groups.google.com/g/go-cd/c/2QicPuyhAec/m/X2-rtMpmAwAJ although that is a user tackling a much bigger upgrade.

 

1. If I upgrade, do the agents need to be upgraded too?

The "real" agent code is auto-upgraded off the server version - what you think of the agent (and packaged as such) is really just a "bootstrapper" that knows how to talk to the server sufficiently to download the latest agent code. As a general rule the bootstrapper will be compatible with server releases within the same 12 month period, but it's a good practice to use later agent versions due to security patching of the underlying libraries in the bootstrapper, support for later Java versions etc.

One caveat is that there was a major change made to agent-server communication in 21.1.0 which might (I can't recall exactly) cause the "old" agent bootstrappers to not be able to talk to the newer server version. You could do a test of this though, if you can't afford any agent downtime and want to plan a more conservative path.

-Chad