Updates
The instance replaces itself, daemon included — on a button, or at a time of day you chose.
Settings → Updates shows the version running, whether a newer release exists, and a button naming what it will install. The automatic half is a time of day and a timezone: what is being chosen is when the instance may be briefly unusable, and 03:00 on a server's clock is not the middle of anybody's night.
What an update does
- Pulls the new images.
- On a cluster, replaces the workers first — once the control plane restarts it can tell nobody anything. A worker that does not come back is carried on without.
- Replaces the dashboard.
- Starts a throwaway container from the new image that replaces the daemon — the process doing the work is the one being replaced, so the last step is handed to something that outlives it. The daemon's options are read back off the container being replaced, so a port or a data directory chosen at install time survives.
Nothing on the instance can be changed while a run is going: every write answers 503 until the new daemon is up. A run stuck longer than it could plausibly take stops counting, so an instance is never locked for ever.
Stable only, by name
Automatic updates install stable releases only — an instance left to update itself must never wander onto a release candidate. The button names the version it will install; nothing here installs "the newest" decided at click time.
The notes
After an upgrade the dashboard shows what changed, once per person. The notes are in the binary, not fetched, so the dialog works behind a firewall — and an instance can only ever show notes up to the version it is on.
What reaches the internet
Checking for a release is the one thing the daemon does on its own: a
plain GET on GitHub's public releases API, with no credential and
nothing about the instance in it. An instance that cannot reach GitHub
reports that it could not check rather than claiming to be current.
By hand
Running the installer again does the same thing from the outside:
curl -fsSL https://cubeship.dev/install.sh | shInstance settings
The domain, the contact address, the public IP, the DNS provider that writes the instance's own records — and the tabs beside them.
GitHub
One GitHub App per instance, so private repositories can be built and a push deploys. Registered from the dashboard, installed on the accounts whose code the instance may build.