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Upgrading ACA-Py Data

Some releases of ACA-Py may be improved by, or even require, an upgrade when moving to a new version. Such changes are documented in the CHANGELOG.md, and those with ACA-Py deployments should take note of those upgrades. This document summarizes the upgrade system in ACA-Py.

Version Information and Automatic Upgrades

The file version.py contains the current version of a running instance of ACA-Py. In addition, a record is made in the ACA-Py secure storage (database) about the "most recently upgraded" version. When deploying a new version of ACA-Py, the version.py value will be higher than the version in secure storage. When that happens, an upgrade is executed, and on successful completion, the version is updated in secure storage to match what is in version.py.

Upgrades are defined in the Upgrade Definition YML file. For a given version listed in the follow, the corresponding entry is what actions are required when upgrading from a previous version. If a version is not listed in the file, there is no upgrade defined for that version from its immediate predecessor version.

Once an upgrade is identified as needed, the process is:

  • Collect (if any) the actions to be taken to get from the version recorded in secure storage to the current version.py
  • Execute the actions from oldest to newest.
    • If the same action is collected more than once (e.g., "Resave the Connection Records" is defined for two different versions), perform the action only once.
  • Store the current ACA-Py version (from version.py) in the secure storage database.

Forced Offline Upgrades

In some cases, it may be necessary to do an offline upgrade, where ACA-Py is taken off line temporarily, the database upgraded explicitly, and then ACA-Py re-deployed as normal. As yet, we do not have any use cases for this, but those deploying ACA-Py should be aware of this possibility. For example, we may at some point need an upgrade that MUST NOT be executed by more than one ACA-Py instance. In that case, a "normal" upgrade could be dangerous for deployments on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.

If the Maintainers of ACA-Py recognize a case where ACA-Py must be upgraded while offline, a new Upgrade feature will be added that will prevent the "auto upgrade" process from executing. See Issue 2201 and Pull Request 2204 for the status of that feature.

Those deploying ACA-Py upgrades for production installations (forced offline or not) should check in each CHANGELOG.md release entry about what upgrades (if any) will be run when upgrading to that version, and consider how they want those upgrades to run in their ACA-Py installation. In most cases, simply deploying the new version should be OK. If the number of records to be upgraded is high (such as a "resave connections" upgrade to a deployment with many, many connections), you may want to do a test upgrade offline first, to see if there is likely to be a service disruption during the upgrade. Plan accordingly!

Tagged upgrades

Upgrades are defined in the Upgrade Definition YML file, in addition to specifying upgrade actions by version they can also be specified by named tags. Unlike version based upgrades where all applicable version based actions will be performed based upon sorted order of versions, with named tags only actions corresponding to provided tags will be performed. Note: --force-upgrade is required when running name tags based upgrade [i.e. provding --named-tag]

Tags are specfied in YML file as below: 

fix_issue_rev_reg:
  fix_issue_rev_reg_records: true

Example 

 ./scripts/run_docker upgrade --force-upgrade --named-tag fix_issue_rev_reg

In case, running multiple tags [say test1 & test2]:
 ./scripts/run_docker upgrade --force-upgrade --named-tag test1 --named-tag test2

Exceptions

There are a couple of upgrade exception conditions to consider, as outlined in the following sections.

No version in secure storage

Versions prior to ACA-Py 0.8.1 did not automatically populate the secure storage "version" record. That only occurred if an upgrade was explicitly executed. As of ACA-Py 0.8.1, the version record is added immediately after the secure storage database is created. If you are upgrading to ACA-Py 0.8.1 or later, and there is no version record in the secure storage, ACA-Py will assume you are running version 0.7.5, and execute the upgrades from version 0.7.5 to the current version. The choice of 0.7.5 as the default is safe because the same upgrades will be run on any version of ACA-Py up to and including 0.7.5, as can be seen in the Upgrade Definition YML file. Thus, even if you are really upgrading from (for example) 0.6.2, the same upgrades are needed as from 0.7.5 to a post-0.8.1 version.

Forcing an upgrade

If you need to force an upgrade from a given version of ACA-Py, a pair of configuration options can be used together. If you specify "--from-version <ver>" and "--force-upgrade", the --from-version version will override what is found (or not) in secure storage, and the upgrade will be from that version to the current one. For example, if you have "0.8.1" in your "secure storage" version, and you know that the upgrade for version 0.8.1 has not been executed, you can use the parameters --from-version v0.7.5 --force-upgrade to force the upgrade on next starting an ACA-Py instance. However, given the few upgrades defined prior to version 0.8.1, and the "no version in secure storage" handling, it is unlikely this capability will ever be needed. We expect to deprecate and remove these options in future (post-0.8.1) ACA-Py versions.