Upgrade old versions

If you are looking to upgrade a recent version of the GitLab chart, see the Upgrade Guide.

Upgrade instructions for older versions are available on this page.

Upgrade to version 3.0

The 3.0.0 release requires manual steps in order to perform the upgrade.

caution
Remember to make a backup before proceeding with the upgrade. Failure to perform these steps as documented may result in the loss of your database. Ensure you have a separate backup.

If you’re using the bundled PostgreSQL, the best way to perform this upgrade is to backup your old database, and restore into a new database instance. We’ve automated some of the steps, as an alternative, you can perform the steps manually.

Prepare the existing database

Note the following:

  • If you are not using the bundled PostgreSQL chart (postgresql.install is false), you do not need to perform this step.
  • If you have multiple charts installed in the same namespace. It may be necessary to pass the Helm release name to the database-upgrade script as well. Replace bash -s STAGE with bash -s -- -r RELEASE STAGE in the example commands provided later.
  • If you installed a chart to a namespace other than your kubectl context’s default, you must pass the namespace to the database-upgrade script. Replace bash -s STAGE with bash -s -- -n NAMESPACE STAGE in the example commands provided later. This option can be used along with -r RELEASE. You can set the context’s default namespace by running kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=NAMESPACE, or using kubens from kubectx.

The pre stage will create a backup of your database using the backup-utility script in the Toolbox, which gets saved to the configured s3 bucket (MinIO by default):

# GITLAB_RELEASE should be the version of the chart you are installing, starting with 'v': v3.0.0
curl -s "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/charts/gitlab/-/raw/${GITLAB_RELEASE}/scripts/database-upgrade" | bash -s pre

Prepare the cluster database secrets

If you are not using the bundled PostgreSQL chart (postgresql.install is false):

  • If you have supplied global.psql.password.key, you do not need to perform this step.
  • If you have supplied global.psql.password.secret, additionally set global.psql.password.key to the name of your existing key to bypass this step.

The secret key for the application database key is changing from postgres-password, to postgresql-password. Use one of the two steps described below to update your database password secret:

  1. If you’d like to use an auto-generated PostgreSQL password, delete the existing secret to allow the upgrade to generate a new password for you. RELEASE-NAME should be the name of the GitLab release from helm list:

    # Create a local copy of the old secret in case we need to restore the old database
kubectl get secret RELEASE-NAME-postgresql-password -o yaml > postgresql-password.backup.yaml
# Delete the secret so a new one can be created
kubectl delete secret RELEASE-NAME-postgresql-password

  2. If you want to use the same password, edit the secret, and change the key from postgres-password to postgresql-password. Additionally, we need a secret for the superuser account. Add a key for that user postgresql-postgres-password:

    # Encode the superuser password into base64
echo SUPERUSER_PASSWORD | base64
kubectl edit secret RELEASE-NAME-postgresql-password
# Make the appropriate changes in your EDITOR window

Delete existing services

The 3.0 release updates an immutable field in the NGINX Ingress, this requires us to first delete all the services before upgrading. You can see more details in our troubleshooting documentation, under Immutable Field Error, spec.clusterIP.

  1. Remove all affected services. RELEASE_NAME should be the name of the GitLab release from helm list:

    kubectl delete services -lrelease=RELEASE_NAME
caution
This will change any dynamic value for the LoadBalancer for NGINX Ingress from this chart, if in use. See global Ingress settings documentation for more details regarding externalIP. You may be required to update DNS records!

Upgrade GitLab

Upgrade GitLab following our standard procedure, with the following additions of:

If you are using the bundled PostgreSQL, disable migrations using the following flag on your upgrade command:

  1. --set gitlab.migrations.enabled=false

We will perform the migrations for the Database in a later step for the bundled PostgreSQL.

Restore the Database

Note the following:

  • If you are not using the bundled PostgreSQL chart (postgresql.install is false), you do not need to perform this step.
  • You’ll need to be using Bash 4.0 or above to run the script successfully as it requires the use of bash associative arrays.

  1. Wait for the upgrade to complete for the Toolbox pod. RELEASE_NAME should be the name of the GitLab release from helm list

    kubectl rollout status -w deployment/RELEASE_NAME-toolbox

  2. After the Toolbox pod is deployed successfully, run the post steps:

    This step will do the following:

    1. Set replicas to 0 for the webservice, sidekiq, and gitlab-exporter deployments. This will prevent any other application from altering the database while the backup is being restored.
    2. Restore the database from the backup created in the pre stage.
    3. Run database migrations for the new version.
    4. Resume the deployments from the first step.
    # GITLAB_RELEASE should be the version of the chart you are installing, starting with 'v': v3.0.0
curl -s "https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/charts/gitlab/-/raw/${GITLAB_RELEASE}/scripts/database-upgrade" | bash -s post

Troubleshooting 3.0 release upgrade process

  • Make sure that you are using Helm 2.14.3 or >= 2.16.1 due to the bug in 2.15.x.

  • If you see any failure during the upgrade, it may be useful to check the description of gitlab-upgrade-check pod for details:

    kubectl get pods -lrelease=RELEASE,app=gitlab
kubectl describe pod <gitlab-upgrade-check-pod-full-name>

  • You may face the error below when running helm upgrade:

    Error: kind ConfigMap with the name "gitlab-gitlab-shell-sshd" already exists in the cluster and wasn't defined in the previous release.
Before upgrading, please either delete the resource from the cluster or remove it from the chart
Error: UPGRADE FAILED: kind ConfigMap with the name "gitlab-gitlab-shell-sshd" already exists in the cluster and wasn't defined in the previous release.
Before upgrading, please either delete the resource from the cluster or remove it from the chart

    The error message can also mention other configmaps like gitlab-redis-health, gitlab-redis-headless, etc. To fix it, make sure that the services were removed as mentioned in the upgrade steps for 3.0 release. After that, also delete the configmaps shown in the error message with: kubectl delete configmap <configmap-name>.