General Upgrade Information

Upgrade Methods

There are two main ways to upgrade ArangoDB:

  • In-Place upgrade: when the installed ArangoDB package is replaced with the new one, and the new ArangoDB binary is started on the existing data directory.
  • Logical upgrade: when the data is exported from the old ArangoDB version, using arangodump and then restored in the new ArangoDB version using arangorestore . Depending on the size of your database, this strategy can be more time consuming, but needed in some circumstances.

Before the Upgrade

Before upgrading, it is recommended to:

  • Check the CHANGELOG and the list of incompatible changes for API or other changes in the new version of ArangoDB, and make sure your applications can deal with them.
  • Check if any technical alert discourages the upgrade to the version you want to upgrade to.
  • As an extra precaution, and as a requirement if you want to downgrade, you might want to:
    • Take a backup of the old ArangoDB database, using Arangodump, as well as
    • Copy the entire “old” data directory to a safe place, after stopping the ArangoDB Server running on it (if you are running an Active Failover, or a Cluster, you will need to take a copy of their data directories, from all involved machines, after stopping all the running ArangoDB processes).

Upgrade Paths

  • It is always possible to upgrade between hot-fixes of the same GA release, i.e from X.Y.w to X.Y.z, where z>w.
    • Examples:
      • Upgrading from 3.6.0 to 3.6.1 or (directly to) 3.6.15 is supported.
      • Upgrading from 3.7.7 to 3.7.8 or (directly to) 3.7.13 is supported.
  • It is possible to upgrade between two different consecutive GA releases, but it is not officially supported to upgrade if the two GA releases are not consecutive (in this case, you first have to upgrade to all intermediate releases).
    • Examples:
      • Upgrading from 3.6 to 3.7 is supported.
      • Upgrading from 3.7 to 3.8 is supported.
      • Upgrading from 3.6 to 3.8 directly is not officially supported! The officially supported upgrade path in this case is 3.6 to 3.7, and then 3.7 to 3.8.
    • Important: before upgrading between two consecutive GA releases it is highly recommended to first upgrade the previous GA release to its latest hot-fix version.
      • Examples:
        • To upgrade from 3.6 to 3.7, first upgrade your 3.6 installation to the latest 3.6 version.
        • To upgrade from 3.7 to 3.8, first upgrade your 3.7 installation to the latest 3.7 version.

Additional Notes Regarding Rolling Upgrades

In addition to the paragraph above, rolling upgrades via the tool Starter are supported, as documented in the Section Upgrading Starter Deployments.