GitLab CE Upgrade 17.10.8 to 17.11.6 – Issues and Rollback Plan

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hai community

just thought of discussing an issue which had happened during recent upgradation process.
I recently upgraded GitLab CE from version 17.10.8-ce.0 to 17.11.6-ce.0 using the following steps:sudo apt install gitlab-ce=17.11.6-ce.0

The screenshot is attached here for reference

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The upgradable list of gitlab was seen to be available before performing the activity.
Despite completing the prerequisites, I encountered some unexpected errors during the upgrade process (details are attached). To resolve them, I had to manually run the following commands:

sudo gitlab-ctl pg-upgrade
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
sudo gitlab-ctl restart

After these steps, the upgrade completed, and the application seems to be working fine — migrations have run, and basic GitLab functionality is available. I have some concerns about hidden issues or secondary dependencies that may not be immediately visible.

To be safe, I’m planning to revert to a VM snapshot taken before the upgrade and perform the upgrade afresh in a controlled and tested manner.
I would appreciate it if anyone could share:

  1. Similar experiences with upgrading from 17.10.x to 17.11.x
  2. Any known issues especially related to PostgreSQL or background migrations
  3. Suggestions for verifying a safe and complete upgrade

Thanks in advance for your support!

2

The upgrade hadn’t taken place at that point, therefore you were still at 17.10.8 until at least the postgres upgrade completed successfully. So you really don’t have anything here to worry about in that respect. Especially since you manually ran the pg-upgrade and it finished. But it’s perfectly fine to revert to the snapshot prior to the upgrade to be 100% sure. I’ve had far worse situations that I’ve recovered from without reverting to a snapshot.

Obviously during a package upgrade, we see that the gitlab upgrade is only waiting for a certain amount of time for the postgres upgrade to finish. I’ve always done mine manually anyway once a new postgres was available.

3

Thank u