Issue

Jenkins notifies that a new version is available but how can I upgrade my cluster
How to upgrade CJE Operations Center
How to upgrade CJE Managed controller(s)

Environment

CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise
CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise - Managed controller (CJE-MM)
CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise - Operations Center (CJE-OC)

Resolution

The proper way to upgrade CJE if to upgrade the CJE CLI. This will automatically upgrade the components of your cluster.

Ensuring you have regular backups of your JENKINS_HOME for your Operations Center, and all controllers, we recommend following the Backup and Restore guide. The backups should be stored on separate hardware from your Jenkins controller, at a minimum, even better would be an offsite location such as cloud storage.

We also want to take another backup immediately before you start the upgrade.

Testing that these backups are valid is also critical, as if the backup is not valid, and we encounter a severe issue during the production upgrade, the way to recover from the failure is to restore from the backup you took immediately prior to the upgrade. A great way to test the validity of these backups is with a Test environment.

Upgrade Warnings

The upgrade notification in Jenkins is shown in the UI via an administrative monitor:

It can also be seen under Manage Jenkins. At the time of the article (CJE 1.6.3), this message guides the users to a broken link and should be ignored. The upgrade path for CJE is via the CJE CLI.

IMPORTANT: CJE release must be supported see CloudBees maintenance lifecycle

Check the impact of the changes

a. Read the CloudBees Release Notes for all the product versions from the current version [Origin] to the version you are targeting to upgrade to [Destination] (including theirs revisions) in order to understand New Features and Known and Resolved issues fixed. Besides, there is other valuable information into tabs:

INFO: Release Date and Jenkins LTS is based on.
Security Advisories: Security Advisories Security features may result in deliberate changes to the behavior of core or certain plugins. So, additional configuration is needed according to Security Advisories](https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/security-advisories) e.g. adding a new Java Argument.

release notes

It is important to highlight that Managed controller (CJE-MM) and Operations Center (CJE-OC) Release Notes are at the bottom of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise for a specific version. There, you will find details about Plugins and their Tiers.

For this task, use the CloudBees Comparing Version Web tool which lists changes from [Origin] to [Destination]: Baseline and Plugins.

CJE-MM - https://release-notes.cloudbees.com/compare/118/[Origin]...[Destination]
CJE-OC - https://release-notes.cloudbees.com/compare/119/[Origin]...[Destination]

release notes

b. Read attentively all Jenkins LTS Upgrade Guide.

c. If you are upgrading Pipeline plugin, you might be facing some incompatibilities due to recent changes on this plugin. You can check those changes on the Wiki of this plugin.

B. Upgrade

Upgrading CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise consists of the following steps:

1) Download a new CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise release

2) Install the new release locally (extract the downloaded archive and the bin directory to the $PATH):

$ cd ~
$ tar zxvf pse_1.6.1_linux_amd64.tar.gz
$ export PATH=~/pse_1.6.1/bin:$PATH

3) Upgrade the CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise project by running the following under the CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise project:

$ cje upgrade-project

Note: In most cases this command will be a no-op.

4) Upgrade CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise components:

$ cje upgrade

Cluster components will be temporarily unavailable during the procedure.

Note: The steps to upgrade CJE are described in the CLI reference

Upgrade Managed controllers

Once CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise has been upgraded, you should see that a new version of the docker image is available for your Managed controller(s):