Platform Upgrades & What’s New

Here you find information about changes compared to the previous platform version, what to consider and where to take action before upgrading.

Note

Before upgrading a machine, please read the General upgrade remarks and Significant breaking changes. Contact our Support for upgrade assistance.

Overview

Why upgrade? Security

Upgrading to the latest platform version as soon as possible is important to get all security package updates and other security-related improvements provided by NixOS (our “upstream” distribution we build on).

We do back-ports for critical security issues but this may take longer in some cases and less important security fixes will not be back-ported most of the time.

NixOS provides regular security updates for about one month after the release. Upstream support for 23.11 ends on 2024-06-30.

New platform features are always developed for the current stable platform version and only critical bug fixes are back-ported to older versions.

How to upgrade?

At the moment, upgrading for customers is only possible by setting the platform version using the API. Ask our Support to schedule an upgrade in a maintenance window or upgrade immediately if you don’t use the API.

We are working on a feature to request upgrades from the customer self-service portal.

General upgrade remarks

Our goal is to make upgrades as smooth as possible without manual intervention but sometimes incompatible configuration has to be fixed before starting an upgrade.

Here are some remarks to make sure that an upgrade will run successfully:

Isolate application deployments

As a general advice: reduce platform dependencies of your application deployment by using Nix-managed service user environments as described in User Package Management or other forms of dependency isolation like containers.

Upgrade staging first

Upgrades should always be checked in a staging environment first. We usually upgrade customer staging machines from our side as soon as the new platform version is ready for general testing. This is announced via our Flying Circus Statuspage where you can also subscribe to updates.

Upgrade to the next platform version

We recommend upgrading platform versions one at a time without skipping versions. Here we assume that you are upgrading from the 23.05 platform.

Direct upgrades from older versions are possible in principle, but we cannot reliably test all combinations for all roles and custom configuration also plays a role here. Usually, problems that occur when skipping versions are only temporary, like service failures that go away with the next system rebuild or a system/service restart.

Check free disk space

About 8-10 GiB should be available on disk before starting an upgrade to avoid triggering a low-disk alarm.

Usually, upgrades have an on-disk size of about 3-6 GiB which may be higher in certain configurations. We keep old system versions and let the Nix garbage collection clean them up, so the additional space will be used for at least 3 days.

Consider performance impact while upgrading

Upgrading may take some time, depending on the number of activated roles and disk speed. For production machines, upgrades are usually done in a maintenance window to reduce impact on regular operations. VM may have degraded performance for some minutes when packages are being downloaded and built.

With NixOS, the switch to the new system happens after a successful system build so most services are unavailable at the same time and only for a small time-window.

Significant breaking changes

These changes often require action before the upgrade. Please review the following common breaking changes and role-specific notes below.

Docker

The deprecated devicemapper storage driver must be enabled explicitly now or Docker won’t start. This problem only affects old machines which already used Docker on NixOS 15.09.

Warning

Before upgrading, check the current storage driver and add the recommended config, if needed, to avoid downtime.

See Docker Storage Driver for details.

PostgreSQL

  • PostgreSQL 11 is not supported anymore as it reached its end of life. Upgrade to at least version 12 or preferably 15 as described in Major Version Upgrades.

  • services.postgresql.ensurePermissions has been deprecated in favor of services.postgresql.ensureUsers.*.ensureDBOwnership which simplifies the setup of database owned by a certain system user in local database contexts (which make use of peer authentication via UNIX sockets), migration guidelines were provided in the NixOS manual, please refer to them if you are affected by a PostgreSQL 15 changing the way GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES is working. services.postgresql.ensurePermissions will be removed in 24.05.

MongoDB

mongodb42 role and package have been removed. Machines that use MongoDB should stay on 23.05 for now. We will bring back older MongoDB versions(up to and including 4.2) for upgrading purposes only. As a long-term solution we are evaluating FerretDB which builds on PostgreSQL and is compatible to MongoDB for many use cases.

RabbitMQ

rabbitmq is upgraded to 3.12. Before upgrading to NixOS 23.11, make sure that all Feature Flags are enabled. 3.12 requires all flags to be enabled or it won’t start.

If all nodes in a cluster are the same version (3.11 on NixOS 23.05), just enable all feature flags:

sudo -u rabbitmq rabbitmqctl enable_feature_flag all

Other notable changes

  • python3 now defaults to Python 3.11.

  • PHP now defaults to PHP 8.2, updated from 8.1. When using the lamp role, the default package changed from lamp_php80 to lamp_php82.

  • Upstream NixOS dropped support for PHP 8.0 as it is end-of-life. It is still useable on our platform but users should upgrade as soon as possible.

  • nodejs_14 and nodejs_16 packages have been removed.

  • Docker now defaults to version 24.

  • wkhtmltopdf packages have been removed. They require a Qt version which has been unsupported for many years and wkhtmltopdf didn’t get updates in a long time.

  • Certificate generation via security.acme (used by the webgateway role) now limits the concurrent number of running certificate renewals and generation jobs, to avoid spiking resource usage when processing many certificates at once. The limit defaults to 5 and can be adjusted via maxConcurrentRenewals. Setting it to 0 disables the limits altogether.

  • services.github-runner / services.github-runners.<name> gained the option nodeRuntimes. The option defaults to [ "node20" ], i.e., the service supports Node.js 20 GitHub Actions only. The list of Node.js versions accepted by nodeRuntimes tracks the versions the upstream GitHub Actions runner supports.

  • For more details, see the release notes of NixOS 23.11.

Significant package updates

  • curl: 8.1 -> 8.4

  • docker: 20.10 -> 24.0

  • docker-compose: 2.18 -> 2.23

  • git: 2.40 -> 2.42

  • glibc: 2.37 -> 2.38

  • grafana: 9.5 -> 10.2

  • haproxy: 2.7 -> 2.8

  • k3s: 1.26 -> 1.27

  • keycloak: 21.1 -> 22.0

  • kubernetes-helm: 3.11 -> 3.13

  • mastodon: 4.1 -> 4.2

  • nginxMainline: 1.24 -> 1.25

  • nix: 2.13 -> 2.18

  • opensearch: 2.6 -> 2.11

  • opensearch-dashboards: 2.6 -> 2.11

  • openssh: 9.3 -> 9.5

  • phpPackages.composer: 2.5 -> 2.6

  • podman: 4.5 -> 4.7

  • poetry: 1.4 -> 1.7

  • powerdns: 4.7 -> 4.8

  • prometheus: 2.44 -> 2.48

  • redis: 7.0 -> 7.2

  • sudo: 1.9.13p3 -> 1.9.15p2

  • systemd: 253 -> 254

  • util-linux: 2.38 -> 2.39

  • varnish: 7.2 -> 7.4

  • zlib: 1.2.13 -> 1.3