Upgrade¶

The pglift instance command line entry point exposes an upgrade command which makes the upgrade of an instance from a version of PostgreSQL to a more recent one easy.

Assuming we have a main instance running with version 14:

$ pglift instance status main
PostgreSQL: running

$ pglift instance get main
 name  version  port  data_checksums  locale  encoding  pending_restart
 main  14       5433  False           C       UTF8      False

Note

Before running an upgrade, it is safer to backup the instance.

First, the old instance needs to be stopped.

$ pglift instance stop main
INFO     stopping PostgreSQL 14/main

Then we can upgrade the instance. Let’s consider we want to upgrade to the version 16.

$ pglift instance upgrade main --version=16
> Confirm upgrade of instance 14/main to version 16? [y/n] (y):
INFO     upgrading instance 14/main as 16/main
INFO     initializing PostgreSQL
INFO     configuring PostgreSQL authentication
INFO     configuring PostgreSQL
INFO     upgrading instance with pg_upgrade
INFO     configuring PostgreSQL
INFO     creating instance dumps directory: /srv/pglift/srv/dumps/16-main
INFO     starting PostgreSQL 16/main

A new instance is created along with the older stopped one.

$ pglift instance list
┏━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ name ┃ version ┃ port ┃ datadir                            ┃ status      ┃
┡━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ main │ 14      │ 5433 │ /srv/pglift/srv/pgsql/14/main/data │ not_running │
│ main │ 16      │ 5433 │ /srv/pglift/srv/pgsql/16/main/data │ running     │
└──────┴─────────┴──────┴────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────┘

Without any provided options, the upgraded instance uses the same port. But it’s possible to use a different one by using the --port option. A different name can as well be chosen with the --name option.

pglift will use the latest available version as target unless we provide one explicitly with the --version option.

Note

Behind the scene, pglift relies on the pg_upgrade command.