Upgrade Kong Gateway OSS

    Kong adheres to semantic versioning, which makes a distinction between “major”, “minor”, and “patch” versions. The upgrade path will be different depending on which previous version from which you are migrating.

    If you are migrating from 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x or 2.3.x, 2.4.x or 2.5.x into 2.6.x is a minor upgrade, but read below for important instructions on database migration, especially for Cassandra users.

    If you are migrating from 1.x, upgrading into 2.6.x is a major upgrade, so, in addition, be aware of any between the 1.x and 2.x series below, further detailed in the CHANGELOG.md document.

    If you are using the provided binary packages, all necessary dependencies for the gateway are bundled and you can skip this section.

    If you are building your dependencies by hand, there are changes since the previous release, so you will need to rebuild them with the latest patches.

    The required OpenResty version for kong 2.6.x is . This is more recent than the version in Kong 2.5.0 (which used ). In addition to an upgraded OpenResty, you will need the correct OpenResty patches for this new version, including the latest release of . The kong-build-tools repository contains , which allows you to more easily build OpenResty with the necessary patches and modules.

    There is a new way to deploy Go using Plugin Servers. For more information, see Developing Go plugins.

    To view the configuration changes between versions, clone the and run git diff on the configuration templates, using -w for greater readability.

    Here’s how to see the differences between previous versions and 2.6.x:

    Note: Adjust the starting version number (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x or 2.5.x) to the version number you are currently using.

    To produce a patch file, use the following command:

    Note: Adjust the starting version number (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x or 2.5.x) to the version number you are currently using.

    Version prerequisites for migrating to version 2.6.x

    The lowest version that Kong 2.6.x supports migrating from is 1.0.x. If you are migrating from a version lower than 0.14.1, you need to migrate to 0.14.1 first. Then, once you are migrating from 0.14.1, please migrate to 1.5.x first.

    Suggested Upgrade Path for Kong 1.0 with the addition of the kong migrations migrate-apis command, which you can use to migrate legacy apis configurations.

    Once you migrated to 1.5.x, you can follow the instructions in the section below to migrate to 2.6.x.

    Postgres

    Kong 2.6.x supports a no-downtime migration model. This means that while the migration is ongoing, you will have two Kong clusters running, sharing the same database. (This is sometimes called the Blue/Green migration model.)

    The migrations are designed so that the new version of Kong is able to use the database as it is migrated while the old Kong cluster keeps working until it is time to decommission it. For this reason, the migration is split into two steps, performed via commands kong migrations up (which does only non-destructive operations) and (which puts the database in the final expected state for Kong 2.6.x).

    1. Download 2.6.x, and configure it to point to the same datastore as your old (1.0 to 2.0) cluster. Run kong migrations up.
    2. After that finishes running, both the old (2.x.x) and new (2.6.x) clusters can now run simultaneously. Start provisioning 2.6.x nodes, but do not use their Admin API yet. If you need to perform Admin API requests, these should be made to the old cluster’s nodes. The reason is to prevent the new cluster from generating data that is not understood by the old cluster.
    3. Gradually divert traffic away from your old nodes, and into your 2.6.x cluster. Monitor your traffic to make sure everything is going smoothly.
    4. When your traffic is fully migrated to the 2.6.x cluster, decommission your old nodes.
    5. From your 2.6.x cluster, run: kong migrations finish. From this point on, it will not be possible to start nodes in the old cluster pointing to the same datastore anymore. Only run this command when you are confident that your migration was successful. From now on, you can safely make Admin API requests to your 2.6.x nodes.

    Cassandra

    Due to internal changes, the table schemas used by Kong 2.6.x on Cassandra are incompatible with those used by Kong 2.1.x (or lower). Migrating using the usual commands kong migrations up and kong migrations finish will require a small window of downtime, since the old and new versions cannot use the database at the same time. Alternatively, to keep your previous version fully operational while the new one initializes, you will need to transfer the data to a new keyspace via a database dump, as described below:

    1. Once that finishes running, both the old (pre-2.1) and new (2.6.x) clusters can now run simultaneously, but the new cluster does not have any data yet.
    2. On the old cluster, run . This will create a file kong.yml with a database dump.
    3. Transfer the file to the new cluster and run kong config db_import kong.yml. This will load the data into the new cluster.
    4. Gradually divert traffic away from your old nodes, and into your 2.6.x cluster. Monitor your traffic to make sure everything is going smoothly.
    5. When your traffic is fully migrated to the 2.6.x cluster, decommission your old nodes.