How do I test my Octopus Deploy upgrade?

Derek_Campbell · 27 September 2019 09:10

Hi,

We are running an older version of Octopus, and we want to upgrade it to the latest LTS.

I looked at the release notes on Octopus.com, and I noted a few breaking changes that we would like to test and correct to ensure they work in our Production instance of Octopus.

We were looking at creating a second instance of Octopus on the same server and backing up and restoring the database and then running a test upgrade on the second instance. Would this work?

Derek_Campbell · 27 September 2019 09:27

Hey,

It’s great to hear you are planning to upgrade your instance of Octopus to the latest LTS version.
You’ll also be following one of our best practices when upgrading; which is to test your upgrade process.

You should use a separate Octopus Server and Database to test your upgrade. The reason for this is that when you run the Installer, it will automatically upgrade all instances on the same server and the attached databases.

When you are upgrading major versions of Octopus, we generally recommend running a Proof of Concept/Test upgrade before running it in your primary instance.

There are a few ways you can do this, and I’ll cover these below. Before carrying any of the below out, we would recommend putting your Octopus instance into Maintenance Mode and also draining your nodes.

All Octopus licenses can be used on up to 3 separate Octopus instances, so it may be worthwhile having a permanent test instance of Octopus for Upgrades, PoC’s, etc…

You can clone your existing Octopus VM and run the test upgrade on this newly cloned server. You would need to ensure you backed up and restored your database to a new database and point the cloned instance to the new database. You can follow https://octopus.com/docs/administration/managing-infrastructure/moving-your-octopus/move-the-database which takes you through how to do this.
You could provision a clean Virtual Machine and set Octopus up using https://octopus.com/docs/administration/managing-infrastructure/moving-your-octopus/move-the-database-and-server. Run your test upgrade on this instance.

Before you do any of this, we recommend you back-up your Database, snapshot your Virtual Machine and back up your Master Key. The purpose of this is to ensure you have something to roll back.

I’d recommend looking at our upgrade guide here and we have an Ask Octopus video here which discusses this in-depth.

Happy Deployments!

Derek