How to properly upgrade plugins when upgrading Elasticsearch?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I've recently upgraded a single Elasticsearch node from 5.6.2 to 5.6.3 and it refused to start because the "analysis-phonetic" plugin also needed to be upgraded.

I maintain my system up-to-date with Debian repositories, so Elasticsearch is upgraded whenever I "apt upgrade". Since I manage many servers, I have a few scripts to help automate this.

There I' ve found out that I also need to be aware of mandatory plugin upgrades and I'm looking for a better automation.

I can easily make a script to automatically remove/install every already installed plugin, then restart Elasticsearch, but something more fine-grained would be better. Like restarting Elasticsearch only if a "blocking" plugin is upgraded.

Is there an already established "good practice" for this?

Thanks you

Here is a very basic shell script for a very naive upgrade workflow :

#!/bin/bash

set -e
set -u

PLUGIN_BIN=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin
NEED_RESTART=""

for plugin in $(${PLUGIN_BIN} list); do
    "${PLUGIN_BIN}" remove "${plugin}"
    "${PLUGIN_BIN}" install "${plugin}"
    NEED_RESTART="1"
done

if [ -n "${NEED_RESTART}" ]; then
    systemctl restart elasticsearch
fi

exit 0
2

I can easily make a script to automatically remove/install every already installed plugin, then restart Elasticsearch

I think that's the right thing to do indeed.
It's somewhat is documented here: Rolling upgrade | Elasticsearch Guide [8.11] | Elastic

Are you looking for something else?

3

Thanks for the confirmation. I understand that there is nothing available to detect if plugins need to be upgraded or not, if they will block ES startup or not.