The last couple of months there have been a lot of updates. My head was and is somewhat spinning. Updating is one of my 10 other jobs. It seems like there is an extra task that has to be done such as upgrading Postgresql or converting to hash storage and a couple cases it was not overly clear that it had to be done until some message appears. Initially I did not know gitlab-runner had to be updated (though no one complained of issues). I guess my main concern is that it’s kind of hard to find what all extra upgrades or configuration (gitlab-ctl rake / reconfigure) has to be done. I guess my experience is building, but are there any other hints or urls you have?
The activities will depend on your current version/ flavour. For e.g., for std Omnibus installation, all the updates such as PostgreSQL upgrades etc. are handled automatically.
Please refer https://docs.gitlab.com/14.3/ee/update/#upgrade-paths (for your target version) to get the steps you need to follow.
Not necessarily! If you use the zero-downtime (which is badly named as it includes downtime) procedure, the e.g. automatic postgresql upgrades (I think conversion to hashed storage did happen automagically though, but that was per project) are not done - it’s not well documented that it works that way, or how to perform those.
I deal with it by spending a lot of time reading the release announcements carefully and checking whether things they say should happen automatically on omnibus installations have happened on our installations.