Auto updater/updating
It would be great if GitLab was even easier to update for small instances. The typical scenario is a user that installed it on a Digital Ocean box 6 months ago and never logs into that box over ssh.
I love how Wordpress, Magento, Chrome, Sublime and others allow you to update themselves from the app.
If course we do not want to compromise the security of GitLab and updating via packages will always be possible.
A reason why self-updating is hard is that many of our files are not owned by our webapp user.
Are there creative solutions to this?
- We prompt the user for the sudo password in the application?
- At the end of our installation we prompt the user to set all packages to auto-update?
sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades
and include GitLab in Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins
Proposal
Build trust and confidence by iterating:
- Start with automatically upgrading only patch releases. I.e. 10.4.0 goes to 10.4.1 automatically.
- Next, move to minor releases. 10.4.1 can upgrade to 10.4.2 automatically. Since we do not include breaking changes in minor releases (we shouldn't be, at least) this should be okay. This is where much of the ROI will likely come from.
- Finally, tackle major upgrades.'
We could do this with our built-in cron perhaps, by checking for updates nightly/weekly.
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