Upgrading GoCD

The steps in this page can be followed to upgrade GoCD. It is recommended to understand any breaking changes between the releases to see if they impact your upgrades in any way.

Note: If upgrading from a GoCD release <= 20.5.0, there is a the one-time DB migration that needs to be performed as well.

Before you start

• Before you begin upgrading, it is recommended that you turn on maintenance mode on your GoCD server (available since version 19.1). Maintenance mode can be turned on under Admin > Server Maintenance Mode

• Navigate to the backup page under Admin > Backups and take a backup. This may take several minutes, depending on the size of your GoCD database and configuration.

• The GoCD server acts as a repository for all your build artifacts. While it is not essential to backup the artifacts before an upgrade, it is good practice to make regular backups of this directory.

  You can configure where GoCD stores build artifacts. The following are the default locations of the artifacts if you have not customized its location:

  Operating System	Location
  Linux	/var/lib/go-server/artifacts
  Windows, MacOS	${GOCD_INSTALL_DIR}/artifacts

Upgrading to the new version

You do not need to stop the Agents to perform an upgrade. GoCD agents will automatically update to the correct version of the software. You do not need to upgrade the GoCD agents. Any builds in progress will be rescheduled, and the existing pipelines will complete as expected. Typically, the installed server will remain compatible with a version of a GoCD agent that is at least 1 year old.

GoCD will perform upgrades of its configuration and database when it starts. This process may take some time for installations with a large number of historical builds (10 to 15 minutes on very large installations). If you suspect that there is a problem with the upgrade, check the go-server.log file to see if there are any reported errors. This migration happens only upon an upgrade, and subsequent restarts will be much faster.

Windows

Run the GoCD installer. Make sure that you specify the same directory as your previously installed version.

If you have changed the GoCD Server Windows service to run as a different user, you will need to repeat this configuration change.

The installer will automatically start the service. Once GoCD completes its internal data changes, you should be able to see the GoCD webpage. Any existing agents should automatically reconnect. Any builds in progress should continue, or be rescheduled.

Linux

Debian based distributions (i.e. Ubuntu)

Run the GoCD installer as described

sudo dpkg -i /path/to/go-server-${version}.deb
# OR
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install go-server

RPM based distributions (i.e. RedHat)

Run the GoCD installer as described

sudo rpm -Uvh /path/to/go-server-${version}.rpm
sudo yum upgrade go-server

MacOS

The MacOS edition of GoCD does not support upgrades. You should simply extract a new version of the GoCD server into a new location and copy over the config and artifacts directory from the old location.