Upgrade Zulip

This page explains how to upgrade a Zulip server, including:

Upgrading to a release

Note that there are additional instructions if you’re using docker-zulip, have patched Zulip, or have modified Zulip-managed configuration files. To upgrade to a new Zulip release:

  1. Read the upgrade notes for all releases newer than what is currently installed.

  2. Download the appropriate release tarball from https://download.zulip.com/server/. You can get the latest release (Zulip Server 7.5) with the following command:

    curl -fLO https://download.zulip.com/server/zulip-server-latest.tar.gz

    You also have the option of upgrading Zulip to a version in a Git repository directly or creating your own release tarballs from a copy of the zulip.git repository using tools/build-release-tarball.

  3. Log in to your Zulip and run as root:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/upgrade-zulip zulip-server-latest.tar.gz

    The upgrade process will:

    • Run apt-get upgrade

    • Install new versions of Zulip’s dependencies (mainly Python packages).

    • (upgrade-zulip-from-git only) Build Zulip’s frontend assets using webpack.

    • Shut down the Zulip service

    • Run a puppet apply

    • Run any database migrations

    • Bring the Zulip service back up on the new version.

Upgrading will result in brief downtime for the service, which should be under 30 seconds unless there is an expensive database migration involved (these will be documented in the release notes, and usually can be avoided with some care). If downtime is problematic for your organization, consider testing the upgrade on a backup in advance, doing the final upgrade at off hours, or buying a support contract.

See the troubleshooting guide if you run into any issues or need to roll back the upgrade.

After you have completed the Zulip upgrade, you may also wish to upgrade the version of PostgreSQL.

Upgrading from a Git repository

Zulip supports upgrading a production installation to any commit in a Git repository, which is great for running pre-release changes from main or maintaining a fork. The process is simple:

# Upgrade to an official release
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git 1.8.1
# Upgrade to a branch (or other Git ref)
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git 2.1.x
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git main

Zulip will automatically fetch the relevant Git commit and upgrade to that version of Zulip.

Branches with names like 2.1.x are stable release branches, containing the changes planned for the next minor release (E.g. 2.1.5); we support these stable release branches as though they were a published release.

The main branch contains changes planned for the next major release (E.g. 3.0); see our documentation on running main before upgrading to it.

By default, this uses the main upstream Zulip server repository, but you can configure any other Git repository by adding a section like this to /etc/zulip/zulip.conf:

[deployment]
git_repo_url = https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git

See also our documentation on upgrading docker-zulip.

Updating settings.py inline documentation

Zulip installations often upgrade many times over their lifetime, and we strive to keep all configuration files backwards-compatible. However, our practice of leaving the /etc/zulip/settings.py unchanged during upgrades means that there may be new features which are not documented in that file, since it was based on a template provided by an earlier version of Zulip, during the initial install.

After upgrading across major versions of Zulip Server, we recommend comparing your /etc/zulip/settings.py file to the current settings template, which can be found in /home/zulip/deployments/current/zproject/prod_settings_template.py. We suggest using that updated template to update /etc/zulip/settings.py:

  1. Copy the current settings.py to make a backup (especially if you do not have a recent complete backup), and make a copy of the current template:

    cp -a /etc/zulip/settings.py ~/zulip-settings-backup.py
cp -a /home/zulip/deployments/current/zproject/prod_settings_template.py /etc/zulip/settings-new.py

  2. Open both /etc/zulip/settings.py and /etc/zulip/settings-new.py files in an editor; for each setting set in settings.py, find its section in /etc/zulip/settings-new.py and copy the setting from settings.py into there.

    The following tool may help, by finding the most likely version of the template that your /etc/zulip/settings.py was installed using, and the differences that your file has from that:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/compare-settings-to-template

    If there are settings which you cannot find documented in /etc/zulip/settings-new.py, check the changelog to see if they have been removed.

  3. Overwrite the configuration with the updated file, and restart the server to pick up the updates; this should be a no-op, but it is much better to discover immediately if it is not:

    cp -a /etc/zulip/settings-new.py /etc/zulip/settings.py
su zulip -c '/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/restart-server'

Troubleshooting and rollback

See also the general Zulip server troubleshooting guide.

The upgrade scripts are idempotent, so there’s no harm in trying again after resolving an issue. The most common causes of errors are:

  • Networking issues (e.g. your Zulip server doesn’t have reliable Internet access or needs a proxy set up). Fix the networking issue and try again.

  • Especially when using upgrade-zulip-from-git, systems with the minimal RAM for running Zulip can run into out-of-memory issues during the upgrade process (generally tools/webpack is the step that fails). You can get past this by shutting down the Zulip server with ./scripts/stop-server to free up RAM before running the upgrade process.

Useful logs are available in a few places:

  • The Zulip upgrade scripts log all output to /var/log/zulip/upgrade.log.

  • The Zulip server logs all Internal Server Errors to /var/log/zulip/errors.log.

If you need help and don’t have a support contract, you can visit #production help in the Zulip development community server for best-effort help. Please include the relevant error output from the above logs in a Markdown code block in any reports.

Rolling back to a prior version

This rollback process is intended for minor releases (e.g. 2.0.3 to 2.0.6); a more complicated process is required to roll back database migrations before downgrading to an older major release.

The Zulip upgrade process works by creating a new deployment under /home/zulip/deployments/ containing a complete copy of the Zulip server code, and then moving the symlinks at /home/zulip/deployments/{current,last,next} as part of the upgrade process.

This means that if the new version isn’t working, you can quickly downgrade to the old version by running /home/zulip/deployments/last/scripts/restart-server, or to an earlier previous version by running /home/zulip/deployments/DATE/scripts/restart-server. The restart-server script stops any running Zulip server, and starts the version corresponding to the restart-server path you call.

Deployment hooks

Zulip’s upgrades have a hook system which allows for arbitrary user-configured actions to run before and after an upgrade.

Files in the /etc/zulip/pre-deploy.d and /etc/zulip/post-deploy.d directories are inspected for files ending with .hook, just before and after the critical period when the server is restarted. Each file is called, sorted in alphabetical order, from the working directory of the new version, with environment variables as described below. If any of them exit with non-0 exit code, the upgrade will abort.

The hook is run with the following environment variables set:

  • ZULIP_OLD_VERSION: The version being upgraded from, which may either be a release name (e.g. 7.0 or 7.0-beta3) or the output from git describe (e.g. 7.0-beta3-2-gdc158b18f2).

  • ZULIP_NEW_VERSION: The version being upgraded to, in the same format as ZULIP_OLD_VERSION.

If the upgrade is upgrading between versions in git, then the following environment variables will also be present:

  • ZULIP_OLD_COMMIT: The full commit hash of the version being upgraded from

  • ZULIP_NEW_COMMIT: The full commit hash of the version being upgraded to

  • ZULIP_OLD_MERGE_BASE_COMMIT: The full commit hash of the merge-base of the version being upgraded from, and the public branch in zulip/zulip. This will be the closest commit in standard Zulip Server to the version being upgraded from.

  • ZULIP_NEW_MERGE_BASE_COMMIT: The full commit hash of the merge-base of the version being upgraded to, and the public branch in zulip/zulip. This will be the closest commit in standard Zulip Server to the version being upgraded to.

See the deploy documentation for hooks included with Zulip.

Preserving local changes to service configuration files

Warning

If you have modified service configuration files installed by Zulip (e.g. the nginx configuration), the Zulip upgrade process will overwrite your configuration when it does the puppet apply.

You can test whether this will happen assuming no upstream changes to the configuration using scripts/zulip-puppet-apply (without the -f option), which will do a test Puppet run and output and changes it would make. Using this list, you can save a copy of any files that you’ve modified, do the upgrade, and then restore your configuration.

That said, Zulip’s configuration files are designed to be flexible enough for a wide range of installations, from a small self-hosted system to Zulip Cloud. Before making local changes to a configuration file, first check whether there’s an option supported by /etc/zulip/zulip.conf for the customization you need. And if you need to make local modifications, please report the issue so that we can make the Zulip Puppet configuration flexible enough to handle your setup.

nginx configuration changes

If you need to modify Zulip’s nginx configuration, we recommend first attempting to add configuration to /etc/nginx/conf.d or /etc/nginx/zulip-include/app.d; those directories are designed for custom configuration, and are not overridden during upgrades. The former is useful for directives with the http context, and the latter for server contexts.

Upgrading the operating system

When you upgrade the operating system on which Zulip is installed (E.g. Ubuntu 20.04 Focal to Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy), you need to take some additional steps to update your Zulip installation, documented below.

The steps are largely the same for the various OS upgrades aside from the versions of PostgreSQL, so you should be able to adapt these instructions for other supported platforms.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 Focal to 22.04 Jammy

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip 5.x release (at least 5.3, which adds support for Ubuntu 22.04 and above).

  2. As the Zulip user, stop the Zulip server and run the following to back up the system:

    supervisorctl stop all
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/release-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  3. Switch to the root user and upgrade the operating system using the OS’s standard tooling. E.g. for Ubuntu, this means running do-release-upgrade and following the prompts until it completes successfully:

    sudo -i # Or otherwise get a root shell
do-release-upgrade

    When do-release-upgrade asks you how to upgrade configuration files for services that Zulip manages like Redis, PostgreSQL, nginx, and memcached, the best choice is N to keep the currently installed version. But it’s not important; the next step will re-install Zulip’s configuration in any case.

  4. As root, upgrade the database to the latest version of PostgreSQL:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/upgrade-postgresql

  5. Next, we need to reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python and rewrite Zulip’s full-text search indexes to work with the upgraded dictionary packages:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets --audit-fts-indexes

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic to 20.04 Focal

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip 3.x or 4.x release (at least 3.0, which adds support for Ubuntu 20.04). You can only upgrade to Zulip 5.0 and newer after completing this process, since newer releases don’t support Ubuntu 18.04.

  2. As the Zulip user, stop the Zulip server and run the following to back up the system:

    supervisorctl stop all
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/release-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  3. Switch to the root user and upgrade the operating system using the OS’s standard tooling. E.g. for Ubuntu, this means running do-release-upgrade and following the prompts until it completes successfully:

    sudo -i # Or otherwise get a root shell
do-release-upgrade

    When do-release-upgrade asks you how to upgrade configuration files for services that Zulip manages like Redis, PostgreSQL, nginx, and memcached, the best choice is N to keep the currently installed version. But it’s not important; the next step will re-install Zulip’s configuration in any case.

  4. As root, upgrade the database to the latest version of PostgreSQL:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/upgrade-postgresql

  5. Next, we need to reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python and rewrite Zulip’s full-text search indexes to work with the upgraded dictionary packages:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets --audit-fts-indexes

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. Finally, Ubuntu 20.04 has a different version of the low-level glibc library, which affects how PostgreSQL orders text data (known as “collations”); this corrupts database indexes that rely on collations. Regenerate the affected indexes by running:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/reindex-textual-data --force

  7. We recommend that you now upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. Although Ubuntu 20.04 is still supported at this time, Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported farther into the future.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial to 18.04 Bionic

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip 2.1.x release. You can only upgrade to Zulip 3.0 and newer after completing this process, since newer releases don’t support Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial.

  2. Same as for Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

  3. Same as for Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

  4. As root, upgrade the database installation and OS configuration to match the new OS version:

    touch /usr/share/postgresql/10/pgroonga_setup.sql.applied
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply -f
pg_dropcluster 10 main --stop
systemctl stop postgresql
pg_upgradecluster 9.5 main
pg_dropcluster 9.5 main
apt remove postgresql-9.5
systemctl start postgresql
systemctl restart memcached

  5. Finally, we need to reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. Upgrade to the latest 4.x release.

  7. As root, verify the contents of the full-text indexes:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py audit_fts_indexes

  8. Upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04, so that you are running a supported operating system.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty to 16.04 Xenial

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip 2.0.x release. You can only upgrade to Zulip 2.1.x and newer after completing this process, since newer releases don’t support Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty.

  2. Same as for Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

  3. Same as for Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

  4. As root, upgrade the database installation and OS configuration to match the new OS version:

    apt remove upstart -y
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply -f
pg_dropcluster 9.5 main --stop
systemctl stop postgresql
pg_upgradecluster -m upgrade 9.3 main
pg_dropcluster 9.3 main
apt remove postgresql-9.3
systemctl start postgresql
service memcached restart

  5. Finally, we need to reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. Upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, so that you are running a supported operating system.

Upgrading from Debian 11 to 12

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest 7.x release.

  2. As the Zulip user, stop the Zulip server and run the following to back up the system:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/stop-server
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/release-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  3. Follow Debian’s instructions to upgrade the OS.

    When prompted for you how to upgrade configuration files for services that Zulip manages like Redis, PostgreSQL, nginx, and memcached, the best choice is N to keep the currently installed version. But it’s not important; the next step will re-install Zulip’s configuration in any case.

  4. As root, run the following steps to regenerate configurations for services used by Zulip:

    apt remove upstart -y
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply -f

  5. Reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets --audit-fts-indexes

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. As an additional step, you can also upgrade the PostgreSQL version.

Upgrading from Debian 10 to 11

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest 5.x release. You can only upgrade to Zulip Server 6.0 and newer after completing this process, since newer releases don’t support Debian 10.

  2. As the Zulip user, stop the Zulip server and run the following to back up the system:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/stop-server
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/release-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  3. Follow Debian’s instructions to upgrade the OS.

    When prompted for you how to upgrade configuration files for services that Zulip manages like Redis, PostgreSQL, nginx, and memcached, the best choice is N to keep the currently installed version. But it’s not important; the next step will re-install Zulip’s configuration in any case.

  4. As root, run the following steps to regenerate configurations for services used by Zulip:

    apt remove upstart -y
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply -f

  5. Reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets --audit-fts-indexes

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. Debian 11 has a different version of the low-level glibc library, which affects how PostgreSQL orders text data (known as “collations”); this corrupts database indexes that rely on collations. Regenerate the affected indexes by running:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/reindex-textual-data --force

  7. As an additional step, you can also upgrade the PostgreSQL version.

Upgrading from Debian 9 to 10

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip 2.1.x release. You can only upgrade to Zulip 3.0 and newer after completing this process, since newer releases don’t support Debian 9.

  2. As the Zulip user, stop the Zulip server and run the following to back up the system:

    supervisorctl stop all
/home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/release-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  3. Follow Debian’s instructions to upgrade the OS.

    When prompted for you how to upgrade configuration files for services that Zulip manages like Redis, PostgreSQL, nginx, and memcached, the best choice is N to keep the currently installed version. But it’s not important; the next step will re-install Zulip’s configuration in any case.

  4. As root, upgrade the database installation and OS configuration to match the new OS version:

    apt remove upstart -y
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/zulip-puppet-apply -f
pg_dropcluster 11 main --stop
systemctl stop postgresql
pg_upgradecluster -m upgrade 9.6 main
pg_dropcluster 9.6 main
apt remove postgresql-9.6
systemctl start postgresql
service memcached restart

  5. Finally, we need to reinstall the current version of Zulip, which among other things will recompile Zulip’s Python module dependencies for your new version of Python:

    rm -rf /srv/zulip-venv-cache/*
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/lib/upgrade-zulip-stage-2 \
    /home/zulip/deployments/current/ --ignore-static-assets

    This will finish by restarting your Zulip server; you should now be able to navigate to its URL and confirm everything is working correctly.

  6. Upgrade to the latest 5.x release, now that your server is running a supported operating system.

  7. Debian 10 has a different version of the low-level glibc library, which affects how PostgreSQL orders text data (known as “collations”); this corrupts database indexes that rely on collations. Regenerate the affected indexes by running:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/reindex-textual-data --force

  8. As root, finish by verifying the contents of the full-text indexes:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py audit_fts_indexes

  9. Upgrading from Debian 10 to 11, so that you are running a supported operating system.

Upgrading PostgreSQL

Starting with Zulip 3.0, we use the latest available version of PostgreSQL at installation time (currently version 15). Upgrades to the version of PostgreSQL are no longer linked to upgrades of the distribution; that is, you may opt to upgrade to PostgreSQL 15 while running Ubuntu 20.04.

Not all versions of Zulip Server support all versions of PostgreSQL, however:

Zulip Server version

Supported versions of PostgreSQL

3.x

9.3, 9.5, 9.6, 10, 11, 12

4.x

9.3, 9.5, 9.6, 10, 11, 12, 13

5.x

10, 11, 12, 13, 14

6.x

11, 12, 13, 14

7.x

12, 13, 14, 15

To upgrade the version of PostgreSQL on the Zulip server:

  1. Upgrade your server to the latest Zulip release (at least 3.0).

  2. Stop the server, as the zulip user:

    # On Zulip before 4.0, use `supervisor stop all` instead
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/stop-server

  3. Take a backup, in case of any problems:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/manage.py backup --output=/home/zulip/postgresql-upgrade.backup.tar.gz

  4. As root, run the database upgrade tool:

    /home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/setup/upgrade-postgresql

  5. As the zulip user, start the server again:

    # On Zulip before 4.0, use `restart-server` instead of `start-server` instead
/home/zulip/deployments/current/scripts/start-server

You should now be able to navigate to the Zulip server’s URL and confirm everything is working correctly.