Mailcow Update

mtjoernelund

For various reasons I have failed to ensure updating of my Mailcow installation. I am therefore all the way back on version 2024-11. Regardless that my mailserver seems to be running very stable, I would like to now try to get back on track and up to date with the latest stable version.

Two main issues:

According to the documentation, update is done using the ./update.sh script. My installation does not have this. I believe that that I need to use the script update-compose.sh in the helper-scripts folder. Is this correct? I guess because I am so far behind, this is no longer documented?
As I am so far behind, I am concerned about breaking changes.

Would greatly appreciate some help on the best approach to get back to being on latest stable version?

Background information that might be relevant. I am running a standard installation. Only customization is that I rely on certdumper to use my wildcard letsencrypt certificate that is obtained by my traefik reverse proxy, and that I have added traefik as reverse proxy in docker-compose.override.yml.

Help on this would be greatly appreciated.

DocFraggle

mtjoernelund update is done using the ./update.sh script

Did you look inside your mailcow directory, default is “/opt/mailcow-dockerized”? The update.sh script should be there.

As for the step by step update procedure which @esackbauer mentioned, you can find the versions here: mailcow/mailcow-dockerizedreleases

Check the version which was release after your version, in your case 2024-11a
Then you can checkout this version in your mailcow directory:

cd /opt/mailcow-dockerized
git checkout 2024-11a

Then, run ./update.sh and check your mailcow afterwards. After that: rinse and repeat. Read the release notes as @esackbauer suggested and you can decide by yourself to skip some minor versions.

esackbauer

If you don’t have the update.sh in your mailcow installation directory I suspect your installation is broken or worse already taken over due to lacking security updates.
You could try to fetch the update.sh file for your release 2024-11 from github (not the latest!).
You should also update from each version to the next version, that means do not go directly from 2024-11 to 2025-10a!
And you MUST read all the release notes for each release inbetween, because a lot has changed and you need to understand those changes or mailcow might break completely.

mtjoernelund

Appreciate the answers!

Fantastic. I must be blind. I was convinced that I did not see the update.sh script in my base folder, but just checked again. The approach of updating one version at the time makes sense, but I am not certain how do I do that practically? @DocFraggle you mention doing a ‘git checkout’ for each version, but as far as I can tell the update-script just checks for latest version online?

I tried to look at the documentation and there does not seem to be a way of forcing to update to a specific version. Happy to read up on documentation myself, but if anyone can give a pointer as to what I need to read up on?

DocFraggle

mtjoernelund as far as I can tell the update-script just checks for latest version online

No it doesn’t. As soon as you checkout a tag, your repo directory enters the detached HEAD state. So git thinks it’s already at the HEAD and won’t update further.
THis way you can update from release to release.

mtjoernelund

Ok, I was not aware of that. So basically the step by step approach is to checkout “the next version”, run update.sh, do necessary updates to config files etc. based on the chang log, and check that everything is running as expected. Once done, I can proceed to checkout the next version and repeat until I am up to date. Correct?

As you mentioned, I can decide to skip some minor version. I would rather play it safe and just do one version at the time, but I assume that where there is a major version with (a), (b) or © releases that are bugfixes for the major version it would make sense to just go straight to the last bugfix version. Is that a fair assumption?

Thank you for taking the time to provide guidance, very much appreciated!

DocFraggle

mtjoernelund In case there are bugfix versions I would recommend to update to the major version first, and then to the last bugfix version (check the release notes for the bigfixes in every case to be sure you don’t miss anything important)

So go to 2024-11, then to 2024-11b for example

mtjoernelund

@DocFraggle Awesome, will do that. Thank you very much for your guidance. Now I just have to get started and get the work done bit by bit.

mtjoernelund

Ok, now I finally found time to get down to this task. But I stall at the update after it has pulled new images. I get the following error:

Committing current status...
Fetching updated code from remote...
Merging local with remote code (recursive, strategy: "theirs", options: "patience"...
fatal: No current branch.

I guess it is because I have checked out a tag. How do I work around this?

esackbauer

./update.sh --stable will switch you back to the latest stable release.

mtjoernelund

esackbauer

So update based on the checked out version and then merge back with the stable version?

esackbauer

Yes, when you have installed the last version before the 2025-10a, then you need to switch to stable version.

mtjoernelund

esackbauer
Sorry. I think I did not clarify my issue properly. As per the advice from @DocFraggle I am trying to update Mailcow stepwise because I am so far behind. Advice is to do ‘git checkout’ for each version to upgrade from one to the next. This is what I am trying to do. So I do:

git checkout 2024-11b

Putting me in detached HEAD state. Then I try to run the update.sh script which is clearly trying to apply the 2024-11b version. But after the script has pulled new images, stoped the containers and apply the update, it exits after the block quoted above, i.e.

Committing current status...
Fetching updated code from remote...
Merging local with remote code (recursive, strategy: "theirs", options: "patience"...
fatal: No current branch.

Seeing as I have checked out a tag and running in Detached HEAD state, I guess it makes sense that it cannot merge with a remove code when I am running against a check out tag. I am not an expert in git, so I may just be missing something completely obvious here…

DocFraggle

mtjoernelund Try running the update.sh script with -d, then it won’t try to merge stuff

-d|--dev - Enables Developer Mode (No Checkout of update.sh for tests)

mailcow/mailcow-dockerizedblob/45666d2c4e21fab5e4e9dcdcad68b3ee5e6356d8/update.sh#L418

mtjoernelund

DocFraggle You are a hero. That worked a charm and I have been able to update going through almost all versions and I am now up to date. Thank you so much for your help!!!

DocFraggle

Great news!!