jordansissel
commented
7 years ago This is something I'd like to provide, but I am not sure how to achieve it.
Some barriers:
- Would the same-version of the plugin remain after the upgrade as before? Or would this upgrade tool provide the newest version of the plugin? Either answer is likely to surprise some segment of users.
- Plugins do not have forward compatibility guarantees. For example, upgrading from Logstash 2.3 to 5.0, and carrying forward non-default plugins, would leave you with a failed upgrade that you would have to manually attend.
- Upstream network failures (rubygems, etc) will cause your yum/apt/dnf upgrade to fail in post-install with no obvious way to recover.
For now, my recommendation is this:
1) Use the offline plugin management steps to create a pack of your preferred plugins 2) Install this pack after you upgrade Logstash.
Here's an alternative idea that we might be able to do. What if our offline plugin management could produce an rpm or deb? Then your workflow for upgrades would be:
1) Build an offline pack as an rpm or deb, let's call it logstash-favorite-plugins version 1. Make this rpm/deb depend on logstash at a given version (say, 5.3.0). This will require a small post-install step for logstash-favorite-plugins that runs the correct bin/logstash-plugin install path/to/pack... command.
2) Install the logstash-favorite-plugins rpm/deb and it will depend on logstash 5.3.0 (as above) and you'll get Logstash 5.3.0 + your plugins
Next, when a new release comes out, repeat these steps.
3) Build an offline pack using Logstash 5.3.1. Call the rpm/deb logstash-favorite-plugins version 2. make it depend on logstash version 5.3.1
4) Instruct dnf/yum/apt to upgrade logstash-favorite-plugins to version 2. This will upgrade Logstash (as a dependency) to 5.3.1.
Thoughts? We might be able to automate some of this (the deb/rpm creation w/ the correct post-install step to install the pack into logstash).
Every time that I upgrade Logstash, which sometimes could even be automatic through unattended_upgrades, I need to install non-default filters and plugins that are being used in my configuration since they get wiped out. It's cumbersome and creates extra work for users.
It would be great if these were preserved upon update... I know it's a little complicated since each version has its own own jruby/ruby environment and all that, but I'm sure there should be some way to capture a list of installed non-default Logstash plugins, and leverage a post-inst hook within the .deb package or some other mechanism to ensure they will be present.