[SOLVED] A question concerning the "Uprading Mattermost Server" documentation

Troubleshooting
1

Hello everyone,

every month I upgrade my Mattermost Server to the latest version. I do this by following the instructions in the manual:
https://docs.mattermost.com/administration/upgrade.html

The manual’s step 8 requires to rename the plugins folders to plugins~. In step 12 it wants you to restart the server. Since mattermost cannot find the plugins folders anymore, it recreates them. They contain the prepackaged plugins.

In step 14 you are asked to type the following commands:

cd {install-path}/mattermost
sudo mv plugins~/ plugins
sudo mv client/plugins~/ client/plugins

Since the plugins folders have been recreated during step 12. The above commands create the following directory structure:

plugins/plugins~
plugins/zoom
plugins/jira

client/plugins/plugins~

Should the “mv” commands simply keep the plugins folders the way they are or should the prepackaged plugins be upgraded?
In the first case, it would be necessary to rename the plugins~ folders to plugins before starting the mattermost service again. In the second case, step 14 must be modified to copy the content of the plugins~ folders to the newly created plugins folders while keeping the newer versions of the prepackaged plugins (zoom, jira).
What was the original intention of the mattermost maintainers?

Thank you very much,
Nils

1 Like
2

Hi everyone,

I am sorry for writing again. Probably, my questions were not clear enough. First of all, I would like to draw a conclusion from my first post: If you follow the upgrade instructions given in the manual, the plugins installed manually will not work!

After having upgraded your Mattermost Server several times according to these upgrade instructions, your plugins directory will look, for example, like this:

plugins/plugins~/plugins~/plugins~/manually_installed_plugins
plugins/automatically_installed_plugins

Since the new Mattermost version (5.12) comes with more prepackaged_plugins (i.e. automatically installed plugins ), it is a good idea to upgrade these plugins while upgrading Mattermost itself.
This is why, I would like to propose to change Step 14 of the Mattermost Manual’s upgrade instructions from

cd {install-path}/mattermost
sudo mv plugins~/ plugins
sudo mv client/plugins~/ client/plugins

to

cd {install-path}/mattermost
sudo rsync -au plugins~/ plugins
sudo rm -rf plugins~
sudo rsync -au client/plugins~/ client/plugins
sudo rm -rf client/plugins~

These commands avoid the above false directory structure to appear and always use the versions of the prepackaged plugins which come with the downloaded Mattermost version, which you use to upgrade your server (i.e. the up-to-date versions).

Can anyone please confirm my concerns? And to whom can I write to ask to change the manual?

Nils

1 Like
3

Hi @nils-schween, sounds good, would you be interested in opening a pull request to make the doc edits and our devs will then review it? Let me know if you have any questions on how to get started.

4

Hi Amy,

thank you for your answer. I opened the required pull request:

Nils

1 Like