Updating to new graylog version fails because of stale graylog_repository.deb file

[hnk]

Hello everyone,

we just experienced an edge case that happens when one tries to update graylog from the 2.1 repository to the 2.2 repository.

We have been running a testing instance of graylog 2.1.2 for some time and I wanted to rerun the ansible role to update the machine.

Inside the setup-Debian.yml file a task Graylog repository package should be downloaded is called:

- name: Graylog repository package should be downloaded
  get_url:
    url: "{{ graylog_apt_deb_url }}"
    dest: '/tmp/graylog_repository.deb'

The problem we ran into: Because the machine has never been rebooted, the destination file still existed but was the deb file for the 2.1 repository. So get_url did not overwrite it and the job then installed the 2.1 repository again and then tried to install graylog-server=2.2.3-1 This fails, of course.

I will shortly send a merge request that fixes this by saving the repository file with its base version added.

I cannot test if a similar issue exists with rpm distributions.

[danvaida]

please see my comment here.

[mariussturm]

@hnk yeah, like @danvaida said the automated update is a little bit problamatic. Sometimes there are manual steps to do like running migrations and whatnot. If this would work automatically users would expect that these steps are also done properly for each version update. So having a breakpoint is actually something good.

[hnk]

I understand the point you made and support the decision.

Then there are some issues at hand:

• Update the documentation to reflect that decision. This is to ensure that someone like me doesn't do anything stupid ;)
• Maybe even check the installed version in the code and explicitly give an error along the lines: "You are trying to update Graylog, this is not supported, see documentation_link."
• Even so: After I did a manual update and then run ansible to provision the machine, it will overwrite the repository file with the old version in the tmp directory, thus leaving me with a broken state. This is still a bug, because even if I explicitly state the target version inside the ansible task, it will install a possibly old, and thus wrong, repository file from the local file system.

[malcyon]

@mariussturm Instead of leaving it broken, maybe we should force users to declare the version of Graylog they want explicitly? Then it's an active choice by them.