Upgrading the Matrix services

This playbook not only installs the various Matrix services for you, but can also upgrade them as new versions are made available.

While this playbook helps you to set up Matrix services and maintain them, it will not automatically run the maintenance task for you. You will need to update the playbook and re-run it manually.

The upstream projects, which this playbook makes use of, occasionally if not often suffer from security vulnerabilities (for example, see here for known ones on Element Web).

Since it is unsafe to keep outdated services running on the server connected to the internet, please consider to update the playbook and re-run it periodically, in order to keep the services up-to-date.

The developers of this playbook strive to maintain the playbook updated, so that you can re-run the playbook to address such vulnerabilities. It is your responsibility to keep your server and the services on it up-to-date.

If you want to be notified when new versions of Synapse are released, you should join the Synapse Homeowners room: #homeowners:matrix.org.

Steps to upgrade the Matrix services

Check the changelog

Before updating the playbook and the Ansible roles in the playbook, take a look at the changelog to see if there have been any backward-incompatible changes that you need to take care of.

Update the playbook and the Ansible roles

If it looks good to you, go to the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy directory, update your playbook directory and all upstream Ansible roles (defined in the requirements.yml file) by running:

either: just update
or: a combination of git pull and just roles (or make roles if you have make program on your computer instead of just)

If you don’t have either just tool or make program, you can run the ansible-galaxy tool directly after updating the playbook: git pull; rm -rf roles/galaxy; ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml -p roles/galaxy/ --force

Note: for details about just commands, take a look at: Running just commands.

Acknowledge breaking changes if any

The playbook uses a migration validation system that ensures you are aware of breaking changes before they’ll affect your deployment. If there is one, you are required to acknowledge each breaking change.

Whenever a breaking change is introduced, the playbook will:

bump its expected version value (matrix_playbook_migration_expected_version), causing a discrepancy with what you validated (matrix_playbook_migration_validated_version)
fail when you run it with a helpful message listing what changed and linking to the relevant changelog entries

After reviewing and adapting your setup, update the variable to the new version.

Re-run the playbook setup

After updating the Ansible roles and the variable for the validation system when necessary, re-run the playbook setup and restart all services:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=install-all,start

If you remove components from vars.yml, or if we switch some component from being installed by default to not being installed by default anymore, you’d need to run the setup command with the setup-all tag as below:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all,ensure-matrix-users-created,start

Notes:

The ensure-matrix-users-created playbook tag makes the playbook automatically create the bot’s user account, if any.
Our estimation is that running --tags=install-all,start is approximately from 2 to 5 times faster than running setup-all,ensure-matrix-users-created,start. See this entry on CHANGELOG.md for more information.
The shortcut commands with the just program are also available: just install-all or just setup-all. Note these shortcuts run the ensure-matrix-users-created tag too.
See this page on the playbook tags for more information about those tags.

PostgreSQL major version upgrade

Major version upgrades to the internal PostgreSQL database are not done automatically. Upgrades must be performed manually.

For details about upgrading it, refer to the upgrading PostgreSQL guide.

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