Upgrading to a New Nautobot Release¶

Review the Release Notes¶

Prior to upgrading your Nautobot instance, be sure to carefully review all release notes that have been published since your current version was released. Although the upgrade process typically does not involve additional work, certain releases may introduce breaking or backward-incompatible changes. These are called out in the release notes under the release in which the change went into effect.

The below sub-sections describe some key changes that deployers should be aware of, but are not intended to be a replacement for reading the release notes carefully and in depth.

Updating from Nautobot 1.0.x to 1.1.x¶

Migration from RQ to Celery¶

Prior to version 1.1.0, Nautobot utilized RQ as the primary background task worker. As of Nautobot 1.1.0, RQ is now deprecated, as Celery has been introduced to eventually replace RQ for executing background tasks within Nautobot. All Nautobot core usage of RQ has been migrated to use Celery.

RQ support for custom tasks was not removed in order to give plugin authors time to migrate, however, to continue to utilize advanced Nautobot features such as Git repository synchronization, webhooks, jobs, etc. you must migrate your nautobot-worker deployment from RQ to Celery.

Please see the section on migrating to Celery from RQ for more information on how to easily migrate your deployment.

Updating from Nautobot 1.1.x to 1.2.x¶

Introduction of Celery Beat Scheduler¶

As of Nautobot v1.2.0, Nautobot supports deferring ("scheduling") Jobs. To facilitate this, a new service called celery-scheduler is now required. Please review the service installation documentation to find out how to set it up.

Updating from Nautobot 1.2.x to 1.3.x¶

Revision of Recommended MySQL UTF-8 Encoding¶

The recommended database encoding settings have been revised to rely upon the default UTF-8 encoding provided by MySQL for collation of data in the database. Previously we were recommending in our documentation that the collation encoding be set explicitly to utf8mb4_bin. We are now recommending utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci which is configured by default on unmodified MySQL database server deployments.

The collation encoding is used to inform MySQL how characters are sorted in the database. This is important when it comes to retrieving data that has special characters or special byte-encoding such as accents or ligatures, and also including emojis. In some cases, with the utf8mb4_bin encoding we were previously recommending, case-insensitive searching may return inconsistent or incorrect results.

Danger

It is strongly recommended that you backup your database before executing this query and that you perform this in a non-production environment to identify any potential issues prior to updating your production environment.

If you have an existing MySQL database, you may update your database to use the recommended encoding by using nautobot-server dbshell to launch a database shell and executing the following command:

$ nautobot-server dbshell
mysql> ALTER DATABASE nautobot COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.07 sec)

Please see the official MySQL documentation on migrating collation encoding settings for more information on troubleshooting any issues you may encounter.

Update Prerequisites to Required Versions¶

Nautobot v1.3.0 and later requires the following:

Dependency	Minimum Version
Python	3.7
PostgreSQL	9.6
Redis	4.0

Nautobot v1.1.0 and later can optionally support the following:

Nautobot v1.1.0 added support for MySQL 8.0 as a database backend as an alternative to PostgreSQL.

Dependency	Minimum Version
MySQL	8.0

Tip

If you wish to migrate from PostgreSQL to MySQL, we recommend creating a new Nautobot installation based on MySQL and then migrating the database contents to the new installation, rather than attempting an in-place upgrade or migration.

Install the Latest Release¶

As with the initial installation, you can upgrade Nautobot by installing the Python package directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Warning

Unless explicitly stated, all steps requiring the use of pip3 or nautobot-server in this document should be performed as the nautobot user!

Upgrade Nautobot using pip3:

$ pip3 install --upgrade nautobot

Upgrade your Optional Dependencies¶

If you do not have any optional dependencies, you may skip this step.

Once the new code is in place, verify that any optional Python packages required by your deployment (e.g. napalm or django-auth-ldap) are listed in local_requirements.txt.

Then, upgrade your dependencies using pip3:

$ pip3 install --upgrade -r $NAUTOBOT_ROOT/local_requirements.txt

Run the Post Upgrade Operations¶

Finally, run Nautobot's post_upgrade management command:

$ nautobot-server post_upgrade

This command performs the following actions:

Applies any database migrations that were included in the release
Generates any missing cable paths among all cable termination objects in the database
Collects all static files to be served by the HTTP service
Deletes stale content types from the database
Deletes all expired user sessions from the database
Clears all cached data to prevent conflicts with the new release

Restart the Nautobot Services¶

Finally, with root permissions, restart the web and background services:

$ sudo systemctl restart nautobot nautobot-worker nautobot-scheduler