Should I upgrade my Gitlab server alone(only Gitlab packages) or can I upgrade Gitlab with the whole system running "sudo apt upgrade"?

Context:

Hello, I am running Gitlab on Ubuntu server 20.04. I updated Gitlab on December and I had to update from version 14.2 to 15.5, so I did multiples hops and updates were done manually , defining each version as recomended Gitlab documentation. Now on, the latest version of Gitlab is 15.9 but I would like to move to 15.8.2??

Original installation was using Linux packages (Omnibus GitLab), but when I upgraded from 14.2 I run:

sudo apt install gitlab-ee=14.9.5-ee.0

My question is, if I can upgrade the whole system (Gitlab and other packages) just running

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Is this recomended or should I first upgrade my Gitlab to the desire release that I want to have and then upgrade the system (other Linux packages)??

Hi @bayardo.rivas :wave:

If you regularly upgrade Gitlab (at least once every month), running sudo apt upgrade can be sufficient.

GitLab releases new packages frequently, and sometimes there are database migrations required or backward-incompatible changes.

Since you’re running a version of GitLab that’s outdated (14.9.5 was released a year ago), you’ll want to upgrade GitLab separately and need to follow an upgrade path.

The upgrade path you’ll need to take can be found here.

Be sure to check for background migrations between each step and allow them to complete before moving on to the next step in the upgrade path.

Here are some additional resources that come in handy when upgrading:

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Hello @gitlab-greg , thanks for your answer and your time. I am not running 14.9.5, that was an dumb example that I used to show the command I ran to upgrade Gitlab in December, hop after hop from release 14.2 to my current running version that is 15.5.

So with that “missunderstanding” cleared, what do you think?? should I first upgrade my Gitlab to the desire release (15.8.2) and then upgrade the system (other Linux packages) or can I run “apt upgrade” and upgrade the whole system at once including Gitlab?? As you can imagine, it was a Omnibus installation in Ubuntu 20.04.

Thank you.

For 15.5, you’ll want to follow this upgrade path:

As of right now, it’d be:

15.5 → 15.6.8 → 15.7.8 → 15.9.2

You can customize the current version to find the upgrade path for any GitLab version here: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/support/toolbox/upgrade-path

The steps in the upgrade path are noted because they’re required for the upgrade to go smoothly. If steps are skipped in the upgrade path and something goes awry, the only option might be to rollback and try again.
Because apt upgrade doesn’t know about GitLab upgrade paths, and since skipping a step in the upgrade path can have serious consequences and impact availability, I generally advise against upgrading GitLab with sudo apt update.

If you want to prevent GitLab from being automatically upgraded when you run sudo apt upgrade, you can use sudo apt-mark hold gitlab-ce. Ubuntu Manpage: apt-mark - show, set and unset various settings for a package

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Thank you @gitlab-greg , I think I have all the information needed for this task. I will be working on it next week and I am preparing all information as possible.

Thanks for sharing this link is a great resource:

https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/support/toolbox/upgrade-path

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