Summary
We are unintentionally now in Entry installation, with no apparent way to retain full functionality by reducing to community Teams version
Steps to reproduce
Be on Mattermost since v8, installed as a free Enterprise version and keep upgrading up to v11. At the time it made more sense as it was free with more features. Now we have upgraded to v11 and were forced into Entry license which is severely limiting to us.
Expected behavior
Well, obviously we want to retain all our messages and remain free. We are a 5 people team and chat a lot and have a history since late 2010s when we were on Slack. We migrated to self hosted Mattermost when Slack started with the silly 90 day history. All the paid options of mattermost are a severe overkill for us, we have no need or use for the vast majority of features it offers.
Observed behavior
We dont have access to our old chats. We far exceed 10k messages.
We understand why mattermost did what it did, and we are ok to be on the teams version, but we dont see any way to do this easily.
Our mattermost is installed from the “https://deb.packages.mattermost.com jammy/main amd64” package source and there only seems to be one “mattermost” package there. Is this package the universal one containing all the versions (Teams, Entry, etc)?
How do we downgrade? Hopefully with retaining our database and upload storage, e.g. without having to rebuild the whole mattermost infrastructure from scratch.
Funny that nobody from Mattermost answers such a simple question.
Here somebody said he’s a “Mattermost Moderator” and it’s possible so switch from Entry to Team in v11, but the question how you do that isn’t answered.
@Mil you can downgrade in place using the -teams version of an old version. Obviously, this isn’t really a long term fix, but it’s what we get for now.
I grabbed the “Extended Support Release” from here:
NOTE: You will have to disable the AI plugin to make it work. Even if you have a starter license, it malfunctions on my install causing pretty much every post to error out when moused over.
You will also probably want to watch for the telemetry that got added somewhere along the way if you care about privacy.
The problem is that v11 forced us into the upgrade of PostgreSQL to v14, which is ok in itself. However the schema has been changed by mattermost too. Going back to v10 on the same database seems kind of dangerous.
There is a v11 available, https://releases.mattermost.com/11.0.2/mattermost-team-11.0.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz
I had no negative effects downgrading from latest to the ESR release on a chat instance that has been running almost as long as Mattermost has been a thing - but for sure I’d do a dry run first to make sure.
11.0.2 still had me on this accursed “Entry Edition”
I did still have problems with the AI plugin. I was having the messages error and frequent client crashes, until I disabled the AI plugin. (If that experience was supposed to make me want to upgrade, it had the opposite effect.)
edit: Worth noting I’m just a fellow user/operator, not a tech. I had exported my database and data into a second instance before transitioning, which is definitely a good idea if you’re able to. In-place updating bit me real hard going from 5.0 to 7.2 and we had data loss.
Its not so big of a problem for me now. we keep our mattermost as one of the services on our AWS instance. I took a snapshot before upgrading to 11 (thank god), so I can just roll us back to v10 if all else fails and theen I’ll just mark mattermost as permanently held.
I would prefer to keep in line with releases though, not a big fan of permpetually running a non-updated piece of sofwtare that has external exposure.
Do you know if anyone maybe maintains a PPA for mattermost-teams?
Yea, this absolute chaos feels so much like the fallout of Slack and slack running interference to hinder mass exodus to Mattermost. But it seems these guys are also corporate in nature and there are few options available. Not mad at them though, mad at myself, should have realized where things are going when they started crapifying free version by stripping existing functionality from it.
There’s a project to take the FOSS version and fork it into a reasonable chat software again. I’m pretty sure you get nuked from orbit for linking it here so I won’t - google is your friend
Ok, I managed to get us on Teams edition without destroying anything and without having to backup/restore from one version to the other. Here are the steps:
You should backup, just in case. You’ve been duly warned. Things could change in the future invalidating this tutorial, I wont be held responsible for your loss of data.
Allow yourself to be upgraded to v11 free enterprise, a.k.a. Entry, note the version (you’ll need it later in step 4)
Note that I used 11.0.2 image because I was upgraded to 11.0.2 Entry. If you read this later, when a newer version is available, please check your Entry version and download teams image with the exact same version. In theory a list of latest images should be available on https://releases.mattermost.com/ but you should be able to construct the URL even without it
Before you execute step 11 (restarting mattermost service), go to config folder and edit config.json file:
Remove the line with ExperimentalViewArchivedChannels if it exists
Disable AI, if enabled, by flipping the toggle on mattermost-ai/Enable flag, look for it under PluginStates node. (thanks, @Maiyannah)
Start the service, let it drill through the database, it will take a minute or few.
Check that the service is working ok by sudo systemctl status mattermost, if green it survived transition. If red, well, ouch, good that you created a backup. You created a backup, right?
Restart all clients to reload new layout
That should be it. Hope it helps.
EDIT: Moved backup recommendation to the top. Backup before upgrading if possible.
