Upgrading an existing installation¶

Maintenance releases¶

You can upgrade to a new maintenance release within the same x.y series with no interruption to Beaker.

Use Yum to upgrade the relevant packages. The packages will automatically restart any running Beaker daemons, but you should signal the Apache server to reload its configuration.

On the Beaker server:

yum upgrade beaker-server
service httpd graceful

Then, on the lab controllers:

yum upgrade beaker-lab-controller
service httpd graceful

Feature releases¶

When upgrading to a new feature release of Beaker, some database changes may be required. These will be detailed in the release notes.

Database schema changes can interfere with Beaker’s normal operation, so you should stop all Beaker services before beginning the upgrade. The sequence of events in this case is:

1. Stop Beaker daemons on the lab controllers.
2. Stop Apache and beakerd on the Beaker server.
3. Use Yum to upgrade all relevant packages.
4. Run beaker-init to apply database changes.
5. Start Apache and beakerd on the Beaker server.
6. Extend all watchdogs using bkr watchdogs-extend.
7. Start Beaker daemons on the lab controllers.

Note that during the outage period, running jobs will be affected. The harness will be unable to report in to Beaker, so the effects may include missing results and missing logs. Extending all watchdogs at the end of the upgrade will mitigate the problem, by allowing recipes to complete normally if their watchdog time was exceeded during the outage.

New harness packages¶

New releases of Beaker occasionally include updated versions of beah, rhts, and other packages which are installed on test systems. The latest versions are published on the Beaker web site.

To update your Beaker server’s copy of the harness packages, run the beaker-repo-update command. See beaker-repo-update for more details.

Downgrading¶

The procedure for downgrading to an earlier version of Beaker is similar to the upgrade procedures described above, with the following differences:

• Use yum downgrade instead of yum upgrade, naming the specific package version you are downgrading to.
• If you are downgrading to an earlier release series, run beaker-init --downgrade=<version> to downgrade the database schema before downgrading any packages. The table below lists the database version corresponding to each Beaker release series.