Question: How to upgrade?

[farahats9]

Hi, I use the version from the master branch and I see it gets updated frequently. Is there security benefit to doing git pull when there are new commits or should I stick to the release which was in 2019?
also after pulling the latest version is there anything required to apply the updates after pulling?

[davidemyers]

Here's what I suggest (this is just one person's opinion):

Start with a fresh git clone and deploy your server(s). Keep the copy around for the life of your server(s) so that you can ./algo update-users if needed. Don't use git pull or you could break things.

If there have been more than a few commits by the time you're ready to deploy more servers, use a fresh git clone again so you get all the changes.

Renaming an algo directory can break it due to the way the Python virtual environment is created so I clone into uniquely named directories:

git clone https://github.com/trailofbits/algo.git algo-$(date +%F)

There is no mechanism to update a deployed AlgoVPN server other than adding and removing users. The server will take care of updating software packages for security and bug fixes as updated packages are released by Ubuntu.

[sethgoldin]

What is best practice here for deploying the most up-to-date, production-ready code? I see two releases but:

• The master branch has more recent updates than the latest release [master is most up-to-date?]
• Master is failing tests [master is not ready for production?]
• Instructions say just to clone the repo [master is indeed ready for production?]

[davidemyers]

The tests are failing because some of the software Algo uses for validation has changed. I've submitted PR #14174 to make the tests pass again.

As I suggest above and as suggested in the main instructions, always use master to get the latest and greatest.