for some reason this was removed by a mod on ml with no indication as to why it was removed…

There should be a dedicated post every time a new version is released so people can ask questions about bugs\issues they encounter when upgrading their lemmy instance. The support community barely has any activity and theres never an official thread for the latest upgrade. The upgrade instructions are usually vague and then you have to go to matrix to ask questions and nothing is organized and cant be search on search engines.

For example im trying to upgrade from .18.5 to the latest (.19.3) but the ansible instructions are:

  • git pull && git checkout 1.4.0
  • Read Pictrs’ Configuration Changes
  • Amend your vars.yml file to respect the new changes

It doesn’t give any details to where I might find the vars.yml file and it doesnt give an example file of what the file should look like after the correct changes are made.

EDIT: if anyone has the same issue. the issue was that the vars.yml file isnt on the server its on your local machine you run ansible from. located in /(domain)/lemmy-ansible/inventory/host_vars/(domain)/

It’s very strange that a platform that has the best ui for finding fixes to issues etc recommends people go to a separate chat platform to ask for questions that will presumably be asked multiple times since its so difficult to keep track of stuff.

Can we please have an official Lemmy Upgrade thread when a new version is released instead of relying on Matrix?

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
    241·
    9 months ago

    for some reason this was removed by a mod on ml with no indication as to why it was removed…

    Because AskLemmy is for open ended discussion, not for tech support or meta discussions about Lemmy’s development.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    7·
    9 months ago

    Don’t take it too hard on yourself, but asklemmy isn’t the place to ask for tech support, which is likely why your post was removed on .ml

    better places would be on !lemmy@lemmy.ml, lemmy support communities, selfhosted, etc. You should use those support communities even if there hasn’t been activity in a while.

    The issue is there are several ways of installing Lemmy and the way to upgrade each type may be different. I suppose no one has written documentation on the update process. Best place to have it may be on the join-lemmy.org site through a pull request. Or if that’s too much work there should be a community for lemmy mods and admins that want to share their experiences and ask questions.

  • wahming@monyet.ccEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    Wouldn’t it make more sense to be asking this in one of the meta / tech focused lemmunities?

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    62·
    9 months ago

    The selfhosted community is a bit more active, but also very few admins actually use exactly the provided Ansible stuff, if at all. My distro isn’t even supported by it, mine’s just a hand written podman-compose. All of the bigger instances are running in the cloud, Kubernetes or otherwise. Some people don’t use Docker at all. There’s AUR packages for ArchLinux to run it directly.

    As a result, each problem one might encounter is different and often they run into different types of problems, none of which are about how to get the new Lemmy version running but rather tweaking and cleaning up the database, moving pict-rs to object storage, etc.

    You should go learn Ansible and Docker and actually understand what it does and how to customize it for your own needs. There won’t always be someone around to spoonfeed you the answers. Ansible on its own is already made to be super simple so that any random sysadmin can pick it up with zero programming knowledge.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    9 months ago

    Doesn’t all that take place on the Git platform?

    Doesn’t make sense to have those discussions here when GitHub/lab/tea wherever it is hosted has a discussions area.

    • NXL@lemmy.mlOP
      41·
      9 months ago

      Nope, its partly on github, partly on the join-lemmy docs page, but mainly scattered across 4 matrix channels.

      I think it does make sense because this is a discussion platform thats very organized and when people google an issue they can easily find it if its here

  • tal@lemmy.today
    31·
    9 months ago

    It doesn’t give any details to where I might find the vars.yml file

    I don’t run a Lemmy instance, but if you have locate installed on your Linux system, you probably have a cron job that periodically updates the database that locate uses. You can probably just type locate vars.yml.

    If you don’t, and don’t want to have locate installed, I suppose you can always run find / -name vars.yml, though it’ll take a bit.