Command Line Upgrades

[KT Walrus]

Please consider providing a command line PHP script to perform installs/upgrades in a cronjob (or as single interactive command). I can handle automating updating the PHP files, but it is a problem to upgrade the database (which resides on multiple servers in multiple datacenters) in a production environment.

I need to be able to perform upgrades of the database and the php files with minimal downtime, perhaps in the early mornings unattended. Ideally, upgrades could be performed in a rolling update to multiply PHP servers/MySQL databases. These services run in containers and rolling updates are easy to automate with the right upgrade system tasks. The upgrades can be tested in the development servers before being pushed to the production servers.

[Matt]

These days it takes generally less than a minute to upgrade to the latest version using the Admin CP auto upgrader.

[Numbered]

Not certainly in that way. In the case of millions of users/topics/answers, the update time may take a long (for business) time. Of course, this also depends on the power of the application server and the database. But overall, the ability to have command-line tools would add a lot of administration, support and deployment abilities. As an example, it would be possible to describe in some manifest file a list with versions of applications/plug-ins and with some continuous integration tool builds an IPS test instance with needed additional stuff, proceed autotests for updated app branch, make deployment to production, etc.

[KT Walrus]

9 hours ago, Matt said:

These days it takes generally less than a minute to upgrade to the latest version using the Admin CP auto upgrader.

I don't mind doing ACP upgrades in the staging servers (for pre-deployment testing), but don't want to manually upgrade the production servers. Automating this process seems like a good thing to do to eliminate any downtime and to minimize the chance of error.

[Joy Rex]

36 minutes ago, KT Walrus said:

I don't mind doing ACP upgrades in the staging servers (for pre-deployment testing), but don't want to manually upgrade the production servers. Automating this process seems like a good thing to do to eliminate any downtime and to minimize the chance of error.

I would think you'd want to manually upgrade the Production servers, since if something did go wrong unless you built in error reporting, you wouldn't know until your customers came screaming at you that the site/forum was down...

[PurplePixel]

Great idea! Is there any command line tool that can perform this at this point?

Also, is there any command line tool that can perform any tasks except the cronjob?

[CoffeeCake]

5 hours ago, PurplePixel said:

Is there any command line tool that can perform this at this point?

No, especially where it matters with the converters.

[Stuart Silvester]

16 hours ago, Paul E. said:

No, especially where it matters with the converters.

Conversions are generally quicker in 4.5, we added vBulletin specific performance improvements too.

[CoffeeCake]

30 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

Conversions are generally quicker in 4.5, we added vBulletin specific performance improvements too.

Good news, however unless "generally quicker" goes from 6 days to under a few hours, the ability to do the ETL via command line is a notable opportunity.

[Maxxius]

Just a quick question. Does a CLI version of a regular IPS upgrade script exist?

@CoffeeCake ?

[CoffeeCake]

No. There is no command line version of the upgrader.

[Linux-Is-Best]

I humbly and respectfully would like to pardon my request that the Invision Development Team please give significant consideration in possibly developing a command-line upgrade and import option. It could be most beneficial for large communities whose content ranges in the millions or billions. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.