Deployment and Upgrades

This document describes the procedures for deploying system configurations and performing upgrades on existing hosts, covering both automatic and manual methods.

Automatic Updates

Our systems are configured to self-update using Ginx, a lightweight Git-ops agent.

How it Works

The ginx systemd service runs in the background and continuously monitors the infrastructure repository for changes.

1. Repository Monitoring: Ginx checks the main branch of https://github.com/rpcu/hephaestus every 60 seconds.
2. Change Detection: When a new commit is detected, Ginx triggers an update process.
3. Local Application: It executes colmena apply-local directly on the machine to apply the new configuration.

This ensures that all fleet nodes converge to the latest configuration state automatically without manual intervention.

Manual Updates

There are two primary methods to manually trigger an update or deploy a specific configuration.

Remote Update (Colmena)

From your operator machine, you can push configurations to one or more targets using Colmena. This is the standard method for initial deployments or forcing updates from a development environment.

colmena apply

To target specific machines:

colmena apply --on <machine-name>

Local Update (SSH)

If you are logged into a host via SSH, you can trigger an immediate update using the osupdate wrapper. This is useful for troubleshooting or applying changes when the automatic agent is paused.

1. SSH into the target machine:

   ssh user@machine-address

2. Execute the update command:

   osupdate

This command essentially performs the same action as the automatic agent, pulling the latest changes and applying the local configuration.