Managing configuration changes when upgrading xwiki (using docker)

[vmassol]

@AutomationX

So basically, when upgrading, you must to merge the existing xwiki.cfg and xwiki.properties , because there may be additions, changes or deletions , using a tool like e.g. WinMerge .

Yes you’re correct. However in practice (i.e. 99% of the time) there’s nothing to merge and we have defaults for all new parameters we add. So the only thing to merge is if we update some old values (the main one that comes to mind is the plugin one).

@AutomationX

Issue #1 : The docker upgrade path violates this, because the docker-entrypoint.sh will use the existing old config files in the permanent data docker volume and copy them back over to the new configuration files within the container, essentially losing the new files, because you can’t access them beforehand.

What I’d propose here is to update script that does the copy and to copy also the original files and/or provide a diff or even better do the merge as we do it in the debian distribution.

Note that there are other files that could also need to be merged: web.xml if you modified it, clustering config (but this is not supported yet in the docker setup OOB), logging configuration, etc.

Would be great if you could raise a jira issue for this at XWiki Docker images - XWiki.org JIRA

@AutomationX

Issue #2 : How do you do all that, without loosing track, running on different systems, containers, docker-compose git repositories and whatnot?

And

@AutomationX

If you have any suggestions, tips, etc. on this, it would be greatly appreciated.
Maybe I’m overcomplicating things

I’ll need to read that slowly and process it. Please note that the docker distributions are quite new and have been done by me and:

• I’ve learning docker
• I’ve never put any application in production using docker

Thus you probably know a lot more than I do on the topic.

I’m actually expecting contributions from users on this! Pull Requests on GitHub - xwiki/xwiki-docker: Dockerfile to build and run XWiki on docker would be awesome

Please raise all issues on XWiki Docker images - XWiki.org JIRA

Thanks.
It’s great that you’re starting this discussion! I’d really love that we have production-ready docker images for XWiki so anything that improves it is good.