Upgrade requirements

In this article

• Recommendations
• Requirements

Recommendations

• Include as few upgrades as possible in your upgrade process. For example, instead of upgrading from GitHub Enterprise 2.17 to 2.18 to 2.19, you could upgrade from GitHub Enterprise 2.17 to 2.19.

• If you’re several versions behind, upgrade your GitHub Enterprise Server instance as far forward as possible with each step of your upgrade process. Using the latest version possible on each upgrade allows you to take advantage of performance improvements and bug fixes. For example, you could upgrade from GitHub Enterprise 2.7 to 2.8 to 2.10, but upgrading from GitHub Enterprise 2.7 to 2.9 to 2.10 uses a later version in the second step.

• Use the latest patch release when upgrading. Browse to the GitHub Enterprise Server Releases page. Next to the release you are upgrading to, click Download, then click the Upgrading tab.

• Use a staging instance to test the upgrade steps. For more information, see "Setting up a staging instance."

• When running multiple upgrades, wait at least 24 hours between feature upgrades to allow data migrations and backgrounded upgrade tasks to fully complete.

Requirements

• You must upgrade from a feature release that's at most two releases behind. For example, to upgrade to GitHub Enterprise 2.19, you must be on GitHub Enterprise 2.18 or 2.17.

• You can upgrade GitHub Enterprise Server to the latest patch release using a hotpatch, which does not require a maintenance window and usually does not require a reboot. You can use hotpatching to upgrade to a newer patch release, but not a feature release. For example, you can upgrade from 2.10.1 to 2.10.5 because they are in the same feature series, but not from 2.10.9 to 2.11.0 because they are in a different feature series.

• A hotpatch may require downtime if the affected services (like kernel, MySQL, or Elasticsearch) require a VM reboot or a service restart. You'll be notified when a reboot or restart is required. You can complete the reboot or restart at a later time.

• Additional root storage must be available when upgrading through hotpatching, as it installs multiple versions of certain services until the upgrade is complete. Pre-flight checks will notify you if you don't have enough root disk storage.

• When upgrading through hotpatching, your instance cannot be too heavily loaded, as it may impact the hotpatching process. Pre-flight checks will consider the load average and the upgrade will fail if the load average is too high.

• If you're upgrading a GitHub Enterprise Server cluster to version 2.16, ensure that you define both a primary datacenter and a Consul configuration in the cluster configuration file before you upgrade. For more information, see "Initializing the cluster."

• Upgrading to GitHub Enterprise Server 2.17 migrates your audit logs from Elasticsearch to MySQL. This migration also increases the amount of time and disk space it takes to restore a snapshot. Before migrating, check the number of bytes in your Elasticsearch audit log indices with this command:

  curl -s http://localhost:9201/audit_log/_stats/store | jq ._all.primaries.store.size_in_bytes

  Use the number to estimate the amount of disk space the MySQL audit logs will need. The script also monitors your free disk space while the import is in progress. Monitoring this number is especially useful if your free disk space is close to the amount of disk space necessary for migration.

After reviewing these recommendations and requirements, you can upgrade GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "Upgrading GitHub Enterprise Server."