Issue

• What do the options in the Beekeeper Upgrade Assistant mean?

Environment

• CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise 2.x
• CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center 2.x

Resolution

There are three options in the Beekeeper Upgrade Assistant View:

• Enroll this instance in the CloudBees Assurance Program
• Allow automatic upgrades of plugins on restart
• Allow automatic downgrades of plugins on restart

The second and third options only have any effect if the first one is checked.

Enroll this instance in the CloudBees Assurance Program

Having this option enabled has the following consequences in the system:

• The Beekeeper plugin monitors the instance installed plugin list and checks it against
  the monitored plugin list (included below). This means that for each plugin
  in this list that is installed, if the installed plugin version is different than
  the specified one, a warning is generated.
• The update center configuration is set to a specific CloudBees-provided update center that for the set of
  monitored plugin list only offers the version specified in the list and the rest
  of available plugins are filtered so that they compatible (dependency-wise) with
  the plugins and versions in the monitored list.
• The “Updates” and “Available” views in the Plugin Manager are also filtered in the same way, in case
  additional update centers are configured.

The list of plugins monitored by the Beekeeper plugin are the ones included in the different releases
of CJP 2.x, which can be found in the CJP documentation:

• Plugins included in CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise 2.x
• Plugins included in CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center 2.x

These lists contain the plugin ids, their versions and whether they are required or optional.

If the option is disabled:

• No monitoring is performed.
• The Update Center is configured to a generic CJP one that provides the latest version of the plugins.
• No local filtering of the “Updates” and “Available” views in the Plugin Manager is performed.

Remarks

• Changing the value of this configuration option involves a reconfiguration of the
  Update Centers. In the current version, either waiting for a refresh of metadata
  or a manual one (“Check Now” button in the “Advanced” tab of the plugin manager)
  is needed.
• If a custom update center (using the CloudBees Update Center plugin) or a CJOC-provided
  Update Center is configured in the system, the Beekeeper Upgrade Assistant does not
  install the Update Center configuration described above.

Allow automatic upgrades of plugins on restart

If the instance is enrolled in the CloudBees Assurance Program and this option
is enabled, in every restart of the instance, for every plugin in the monitored list
that is installed in the system in an older version than the one provided in the list
the Upgrade Assistant will try to upgrade the plugin.

If this upgrade requires the installation on some dependencies this will be
performed before upgrading the plugin.

The upgrade will fail if:

• Any needed dependency fails to install or upgrade.
• The system is unable to install the target version of the plugin in the
  appropriate location inside the $JENKINS_HOME folder.

Allow automatic downgrades of plugins on restart

If the instance is enrolled in the CloudBees Assurance Program and this option
is enabled, in every restart of the instance, for every plugin in the monitored list
that is installed in the system in a newer version than the one provided in the list
the Upgrade Assistant will try to downgrade the plugin.

As always downgrades are much riskier than upgrades,
this option should be used with great caution and in any case backup should
always be performed before.

The downgrade will fail if:

• There are other plugins in the system that depends on the currently installed version
  and this dependency is not satisfied by the target version.
• The system is unable to install the target version of the plugin in the
  appropriate location inside the $JENKINS_HOME folder.