Upgrading Tungsten Replicator: as easy as ...

When I talked about the usability improvements of Tungsten Replicator, I did not mention the procedure for upgrading. I was reminded about it by a question in the TR mailing list, and since the question was very relevant, I updated the Tungsten Cookbook with some quick upgrading instructions. A quick upgrading procedure is as important as the installer. Since we release software quite often, either because we have scheduled features to release or because of bug fixes, users want to apply a new release to an existing installation without much fuss. You can do the upgrade with a very quick and painless procedure. Let's suppose that you have installed one Tungsten Replicator cluster using this command:

#
# using tungsten-replicator 2.0.4
#
TUNGSTEN_HOME=/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave
./tools/tungsten-installer \
  --master-slave \
  --master-host=r1 \
  --datasource-user=tungsten \
  --datasource-password=secret \
  --service-name=dragon \
  --home-directory=$TUNGSTEN_HOME \
  --cluster-hosts=r1,r2,r3,r4 \
  --start-and-report

If you want to upgrade to the very latest Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5, build 321, this is what you need to do.

• Get the latest tarball, and expand it;
• Stop the replicator;
• Run the update command (this will also restart the replicator)
• Check that the replicator is running again.

The actual upgrade command is in bold in the following script.

#
# using tungsten-replicator 2.0.5-321 (get it from bit.ly/tr20_builds) 
#
TUNGSTEN_HOME=/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave
HOSTS=(r1 r2 r3 r4)
for HOST in ${HOSTS[*]} 
do 
   ssh $HOST $TUNGSTEN_HOME/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/bin/replicator stop 
   ./tools/update --host=$HOST --user=tungsten --release-directory=$TUNGSTEN_HOME -q 
   $$TUNGSTEN_HOME/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/bin/trepctl -host $HOST services
done

One benefit of this procedure, in addition to being brief and effective, is that the previous binaries are preserved. Before the upgrade, you will see:

$ ls -lh ~/installs/master_slave/ ~/installs/master_slave/releases
/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/:
total 32K
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 backups
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 configs
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 relay
drwxrwxr-x 4 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:06 releases
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 service-logs
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 share
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 thl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tungsten tungsten   75 Sep 22 22:06 tungsten -> /home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/releases/tungsten-replicator-2.0.4
/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/releases:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 6 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 tungsten-replicator-2.0.4

The 'tungsten' directory is a symlink to the actual binaries inside the 'releases' directory. After the upgrade, the same directory looks like this:

ls -lh ~/installs/master_slave/ ~/installs/master_slave/releases
/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/:
total 32K
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 backups
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 configs
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 relay
drwxrwxr-x 4 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:06 releases
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 service-logs
drwxrwxr-x 2 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 share
drwxrwxr-x 3 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 thl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tungsten tungsten   75 Sep 22 22:06 tungsten -> /home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/releases/tungsten-replicator-2.0.5-321

/home/tungsten/installs/master_slave/releases:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 6 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:03 tungsten-replicator-2.0.4
drwxr-xr-x 6 tungsten tungsten 4.0K Sep 22 22:06 tungsten-replicator-2.0.5-321

If you did some manual change to the files in 2.0.4, you will be able to retrieve them. Upgrading from earlier versions of Tungsten Replicator is not as smooth. Since we changed the installation format, it has become incompatible from previous versions. Clusters running TR 2.0.3 need to be reinstalled manually. The next upgrade, though, will be much faster!