Upgrade notes

Before upgrading a Rudder server, you should make a backup by following the backup procedure.

Plugins upgrade

If your server is connected to the Internet (directly or through a proxy), and you have configured your account in the setup wizard (or directly in /opt/rudder/etc/rudder-pkg/rudder-pkg.conf), the upgrade process will take care of upgrading to plugins to a compatible version.

If it is not the case, you will need to download the new ones from downloads.rudder.io. and install them following the usual installation procedure.

You can check the current state of plugins with:

rudder package list --all

Upgrade from Rudder 7.3 or 8.0 to 8.1

Upgrade from Rudder 7.3 or 8.0 is supported.

New implementation of rudder package

The plugin manager has been rewritten and its command-line interface is now simpler and more user-friendly. All commands taking plugin names now accept multiple values.

The new interface is not compatible with the earlier one and the arguments and options were reworked. For most used commands the changes are:

  • rudder package install-file <file> → rudder package install <file>

  • rudder package plugin enable/disable <plugin> → rudder package enable/disable <plugin>

  • rudder package check-connection → rudder package update --check

You can still use the previous implementation with RUDDER_PKG_COMPAT=1 rudder package …​, but it will be removed in an upcoming release.

PostgreSQL>=13 version on RHEL 8 (and related distributions)

Rudder 8.0 requires PostgreSQL 13 or newer, but on RHEL 8 (and derivatives), the version present by default in the system repositories is PostgreSQL 10.

Before installing or upgrading to 8.0, you need to install a compatible PostgreSQL version on your server. You can do so it two ways:

yum module enable postgresql:13

  • By installing PostgreSQL from the upstream official repository, following these instructions.

Rudder run now update the policies by default

Until Rudder 7, running rudder agent run only ran local policies, and to update the policies from the server before running them, users had to add the -u flag.

In Rudder 8 the default behavior is now to update the policies before running them. A new -l (for "local") flag disables the update, and the -u flag is now ignored.

Drop radius support for user authentication

The support of user authentication through Radius, which was deprecated since Rudder 7, has been removed.

API tokens

The API tokens storage changes starting from 8.0. Plain tokens are now only available once after creation or re-generation, and the server only stores a hash. This improves the security and traceability of the tokens.

It does not change anything from a user perspective: the tokens are still a 32-character string, and are used in the same way in the requests, all changes are in the server.

For compatibility, previous tokens will continue working after upgrade, and a warning will be displayed in the interface if you still use them. Users are encouraged to plan replacement of the old tokens after upgrade, as they will stop working in a future Rudder version.

Node delete mode is "erase"

Historically, Rudder has supported a node delete mode where node information was moved in a dedicated LDAP branch and not deleted in addition to the real deletion of information. The choice was configured by property rudder.nodes.delete.defaultMode and the default was erase since Rudder 7.2. At the same time, the move mode was deprecated. As of Rudder 8.0, the old move mode is removed and node information is erased from the database when a node is deleted.

Windows OS conditions

Windows agents starting from 7.3.4 (and 8.0.0) have new OS conditions for each Windows version (e.g. Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 11, etc.) and they are now available in the technique editor interface, in the Conditions method tab.

Do not use these new conditions on agents older then 7.3.4, as they will never be defined. This means:

  • Positive conditions like windows_10 will never be defined, even on a Windows 10 system

  • Negative conditions like !windows_server_2016 will always be defined, even on a Windows Server 2016

You should hence make sure your Windows agents are >=8.0 or >=7.3.4 before using these new conditions.

Upgrade from Rudder 7.2 or older to 8.1

Direct upgrades from 7.2 versions and older are no longer supported on 8.1. If you are still running one of those, either on servers or nodes, please first upgrade to one of the supported versions, and then upgrade to 8.1.


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