General Upgrade Information

To upgrade an existing ArangoDB 2.x to 3.0 please use the procedure describedhere.

To upgrade an existing ArangoDB database to a newer version of ArangoDB (e.g. 3.0 to 3.1, or 3.1 to 3.2), the following method is recommended:

  • Check the CHANGELOG and thelist of incompatible changes for API orother changes in the new version of ArangoDB and make sure your applicationscan deal with them
  • Stop the “old” arangod service or binary
  • Copy the entire “old” data directory to a safe place (that is, a backup)
  • Install the new version of ArangoDB and start the server withthe —database.auto-upgrade option once. This might write to the logfile of ArangoDB,so you may want to check the logs for any issues before going on.

  • Start the “new” arangod service or binary regularly and check the logs for anyissues. When you’re confident everything went well, you may want to check thedatabase directory for any files with the ending .old. These files arecreated by ArangoDB during upgrades and can be safely removed manually later.If anything goes wrong during or shortly after the upgrade:

  • Stop the “new” arangod service or binary

  • Revert to the “old” arangod binary and restore the “old” data directory
  • Start the “old” version againIt is not supported to use datafiles created or modified by a newerversion of ArangoDB with an older ArangoDB version. For example, it isunsupported and is likely to cause problems when using 3.2 datafileswith an ArangoDB 3.0 instance.

Switching the storage engine

In order to use a different storage engine with an existing data directory,it is required to first create a logical backup of the data using arangodump.

After that, the arangod server should be restarted with the desired storageengine selected (this can be done by setting the option —server.storage-engine) and using a non-existing data directory.

When the server is up and running with the desired storage engine, the datacan be re-imported using arangorestore.