Best Way To Update / Upgrade

[nateProjects]

What is the best way to update / upgrade OtterWiki?

If I installed via uWSGI do I just update the repo? Any other prep, post-update tasks?

I’ve presumed if you installed it via Docker then you just destroy the container and pull and deploy a new one with the updated version, but I didn’t take that path.

[rluzuriaga]

@nateProjects I am another user, not this project's developer, but I can tell you what I do.

1. Stop the otterwiki and nginx services
   sudo systemctl stop otterwiki && sudo systemctl stop nginx
2. Change directory to the location of otterwiki, for me that is in /opt
   cd /opt/otterwiki
3. Fetch all the repo changes
   git fetch
4. Checkout the latest version
   git checkout v2.10.6
5. Update the pip packages if needed
   ./venv/bin/pip install .
6. Start the services
   sudo systemctl start nginx && sudo systemctl start otterwiki

I am curious if others have another method but this is simple and has worked for me every time.

Edit: I just remembered that I did have to do one more thing to update from v2.10.4 to v2.10.5. I had to install the new pip packages. Update the steps above.

[ShawnMilo]

It doesn't seem like there should be any reason to stop & restart nginx. Either the app is listening on that port, or it isn't. The only difference stopping nginx would make is which error a user would get in their browser when they tried to go to the wiki while otterwiki isn't running.

Am I missing something?

[rluzuriaga]

Oh yeah I guess I should have specified why I stop and start the services. A lot of other people use this instance of otterwiki for documentation at work. So I stop the services so that they can't connect to it while I update the server and otterwiki.

[redimp]

Hello everyone, good question and good answers, I appreciate all the effort!

What @rluzuriaga has described looks good to me. If you stop your reverse proxy (e.g. nginx) for the update depends on your personal taste and patterns. In my environments the reverse proxy serves multiple services, so I don't stop em while I upgrade An Otter Wiki.

As shown above: When deploying from source I stronly recommend to checkout the tag of the latest release, I have to update the docs about this.

I general the goal for any update is to not have any breaking changes, so that no manual modifications of the settings.cfg, the environment variables, the sqlite database or the repository should be necessary. If this would be the case, there will be a big note in the release notes.

For the sake of completeness, when updating a deployment made with docker compose, I recommend just to run

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

which should keep the downtime very short.

[rhartmann]

I also use that. Little note: stop before up forces a container restart even if no new image was available. Compose up detects if anything needs to be recreated (which involves stopping if necessary).

[redimp]

Thanks for this hint! Updated my posting.

[redimp]

To make these infors easier to find, I've added how to Upgrade to the documentation on otterwiki.com.