Gerrit upgrade path

[Byron Gee]

Hi, we have an old instance of gerrit, version 2.11.2 running on rhel6.  What would be your suggested path to get this instance upgraded to the latest and running on rhel8 or 9.  we can't upgrade in place, we would need to build a new server with newer OS.

Thanks,

byron

[Daniele Sassoli]

Hi Byron

On Wednesday, 10 December 2025 at 21:53:35 UTC Byron Gee wrote:

Hi, we have an old instance of gerrit, version 2.11.2 running on rhel6.  What would be your suggested path to get this instance upgraded to the latest and running on rhel8 or 9.  we can't upgrade in place, we would need to build a new server with newer OS.

 

Wow, heck of an upgrade here, I'm sure a few others will chime in here but I
believe the first step is to upgrade to Gerrit 2.16 with reviewDB, then 2.16
with NoteDB, and then if you can, it would probably make sense to go directly to
Gerrit 3.13 with a project by project import, but that might be a bit ambitious.

GerritForgeTV has a whole playlist on how to do upgrades at [1], while at [2] I
speak specifically about importing directly to a brand new Gerrit 3.10
cluster(same concepts apply to 3.13).

I'm unsure about your experience administrating Gerrit servers, as far as
migration goes this is not going to be an easy one. There are also companies
that offer professional services specifically for this, you can find a list at
[3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfmB6nWRFWk&list=PLySCWiWz9cNum6wmySRlIRLkmXdh_jBoT 
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK5qsb0W7q4&list=PLySCWiWz9cNtZ1W0QzWq3TwPTRB7UWwy-&index=13
[3] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/support.html#enterprise-support

ATB,
Dani

Thanks,

byron

 

[Byron Gee]

thanks for the info, we’ll have to look into this

Thanks!

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 10, 2025, at 2:29 PM, Daniele Sassoli <daniele...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Byron

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[Ian Maxon]

Hey Byron,
I went through an upgrade from 2.13.3 to 3.1.4 around 2021. Your post
definitely brought up memories of what I remember being a bit of a
task to attempt safely.
From what I can tell looking through my old notes, the path I took was this:
2.13.3 -> 2.14.6 -> 2.14.19 -> 2.15.12 -> 2.15.17 -> 2.16.12 -> 3.0.2
-> 3.0.6 -> 3.0.8 -> 3.0.9 -> 3.0.12 -> 3.1.4

Some of these steps probably weren't necessary. Examining the release
notes carefully to find the breaking changes between versions is the
way to go. I think I did that but ran into some weird issues, so I
started making the version jumps smaller or something. Automating a
way to stage the upgrade, and automate going to each step before
validating and picking a next step helps a lot.

Best of luck on the upgrade path.
-Ian

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/repo-discuss/832658BF-1BB0-4276-A7A5-B6B4B920BA12%40gmail.com.

[Byron Gee]

thank you for the info have you migrated to new VM running newer OS?
I’ll need to go from rhel 6 to rhel 8 or 9 as well, seems like it’s gonna be a nightmare


Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 10, 2025, at 5:19 PM, Ian Maxon <ima...@uci.edu> wrote:
>
> Hey Byron,

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/repo-discuss/CAN_YF5xRmoEJ7chLgJQ41wnr28f_Bbpx1D-uefzvxeHJpD1_qw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Kenyon Ralph]

On Wednesday, December 10, 2025 at 5:50:26 PM UTC-8 Byron Gee wrote:

thank you for the info have you migrated to new VM running newer OS?
I’ll need to go from rhel 6 to rhel 8 or 9 as well, seems like it’s gonna be a nightmare 

Yes, it is a very large effort doing an upgrade from that old of a starting point. Here is a post about mine: https://groups.google.com/g/repo-discuss/c/tA2_aQJ3KzU/m/9BuVqDuRAAAJ

[Ian Maxon]

Of course, happy to help. I think that path was taken on CentOS 7.
What I did was make a container based on that distro, modifying it
from https://github.com/GerritCodeReview/docker-gerrit . I then built
all those versions and made a script to start the container at one
version, attempt a reindex or whatever was needed, and test the
instance manually to see if it appeared to behave normally. My current
instance is descended from this one that started on CentOS 6 bare
metal originally, lived for a long time in containers on CentOS 7, and
now it's on Ubuntu 22 LTS in a VM.

In general the fact that Gerrit is written in Java is a great help
with this sort of thing. Basically the only real distribution
compatibility problem you are likely to run into at any step is not
having the right version of the JVM (I ran into this going from 3.6 to
3.10). You could probably hop straight to whatever OS you want, as
long as you can get the right versions of the JVM for your chosen
upgrade path (2.11 might be JDK7?)

> >> [1] https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfmB6nWRFWk&list=PLySCWiWz9cNum6wmySRlIRLkmXdh_jBoT__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!IIJe0zmoh1Afa_nhe5dH_OSY2LjoQfCmQrMJ2AEdcgixcFkIXXESkN-xOObD6Zfu_uLj0ERkK6snt6lnAPw$
> >> [2] https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK5qsb0W7q4&list=PLySCWiWz9cNtZ1W0QzWq3TwPTRB7UWwy-&index=13__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!IIJe0zmoh1Afa_nhe5dH_OSY2LjoQfCmQrMJ2AEdcgixcFkIXXESkN-xOObD6Zfu_uLj0ERkK6sndDtWsqk$
> >> [3] https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.gerritcodereview.com/support.html*enterprise-support__;Iw!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!IIJe0zmoh1Afa_nhe5dH_OSY2LjoQfCmQrMJ2AEdcgixcFkIXXESkN-xOObD6Zfu_uLj0ERkK6snKDFC1Wo$

> >>
> >> ATB,
> >> Dani
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> byron
> >>
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[Z]

Hi, Maxon:

> > From what I can tell looking through my old notes, the path I took was this:
> > 2.13.3 -> 2.14.6 -> 2.14.19 -> 2.15.12 -> 2.15.17 -> 2.16.12 -> 3.0.2 -> 3.0.6 -> 3.0.8 -> 3.0.9 -> 3.0.12 -> 3.1.4

This upgrade path involves multiple upgrades. 

Reindex after each gerrit version init ,  or  reindex  after init the final version?

 

Thanks you!

Ian Maxon 在 2025年12月11日 星期四上午10:05:06 [UTC+8] 的信中寫道：

[Matthias Sohn]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 8:25 AM Z <vista...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Maxon:

> > From what I can tell looking through my old notes, the path I took was this:
> > 2.13.3 -> 2.14.6 -> 2.14.19 -> 2.15.12 -> 2.15.17 -> 2.16.12 -> 3.0.2 -> 3.0.6 -> 3.0.8 -> 3.0.9 -> 3.0.12 -> 3.1.4

This upgrade path involves multiple upgrades. 

Reindex after each gerrit version init ,  or  reindex  after init the final version?

Do the upgrades one minor release at a time (skip the intermediate service releases) using always the latest version

of each minor release otherwise you miss many bug fixes and improvements. It may be possible to skip some of the 3.x upgrades.

Read at least the important notes of all the release notes between your start version and the final target version.

After every upgrade step at least test if gerrit starts, if you don't reindex in between the steps (which can save a lot of time)

search won't work.

• 2.13.14
• 2.14.22
• 2.15.22
• 2.16.28
• run the noteDB migration
• 3.0.16
• 3.1.16
• don't stop here upgrade at least to a supported release (the green ones at the end of this list)
• 3.2.14
• 3.3.11
• 3.4.8
• 3.5.6
• 3.6.8
• 3.7.9
• 3.8.10
• 3.9.11
• 3.10.9
• 3.11.7
• 3.12.3
• 3.13.1
• when you reached your target version run offline reindexing to create a new search index

Test the complete procedure, script it so that you can rinse and repeat in case you hit issues.

Don't forget a full backup.

-Matthias

More info at http://groups.google.com/group/repo-discuss?hl=en

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