Upgrade Indico from 1.2

If you’re running a version that is lower than 2.0, you will have to run a special migration command provided by the indico-migrate package. This document will guide you over the steps needed to perform the upgrade.

Prerequisites

In order to migrate to version 2.0 of Indico you will first of all need to make sure you have at least version 1.2 of Indico installed. Migration of databases using earlier versions will either fail or very likely result in data loss. So, please make sure that you are on 1.2.x before migrating.

Warning

If you are running a version of the experimental (thus unsupported) 1.9.x branch, you will have to perform a step-by-step migration. We hope that, as advised, no-one upgraded to intermediate 1.9.x releases. If you did and need help with it, please ping us on IRC.

Backing up ZODB

The migration script doesn’t write to the ZODB, but we still recommend that you make a backup just in case:

repozo -B -F -r <some-place-safe> -f <indico-db-dir>/Data.fs --verbose

You should replace <some-place-safe> with the directory in your filesystem where you want to keep the backup. As for <indico-db-dir>, that’s the directory where the database file is kept. That should be /opt/indico/db in most Indico installations.

Make sure that backup files have been created (you should have an *.index and an *.fs file).

Now, let’s shut down the ZEO daemon:

zdaemon -C /opt/indico/etc/zdctl.conf stop

Double check that the daemon is not running:

zdaemon -C /opt/indico/etc/zdctl.conf status

Moving legacy data

Indico 2.0 will use a directory structure that is similar to Indico 1.x, so first of all you will need to rename the old tree:

mv /opt/indico /opt/indico-legacy

Warning

After the migration is done, do not delete the /opt/indico-legacy directory without first moving the archive dir elsewhere. Please read the full guide until the end.

Installing Indico 2.0

The first step should be to have a working Indico 2.0 setup. In order to do that, you should follow the regular Indico 2.x installation instructions up to the “Configure Indico” step. We provide below direct links to the relevant sections of the installation guides.

On a Debian/Ubuntu system:

nginx Apache
1. Install Packages 1. Install Packages
2. Create a Database 2. Create a Database
3. Configure uWSGI & nginx 3. Configure uWSGI & Apache
4. Create an SSL Certificate 4. Create an SSL Certificate
5. Install Indico 5. Install Indico
6. Configure Indico 6. Configure Indico

On a CentOS7-based system:

nginx Apache
1. Enable EPEL 1. Enable EPEL
2. Install Packages 2. Install Packages
3. Create a Database 3. Create a Database
4. Configure uWSGI & nginx 4. Configure uWSGI & Apache
5. Create an SSL Certificate 5. Create an SSL Certificate
6. Configure SELinux 6. Configure SELinux
7. Install Indico 7. Install Indico
8. Configure Indico 8. Configure Indico

Configuration Wizard

You will then need to run the Configuration Wizard, following the normal installation guide (Debian/Ubuntu or CentOS). When the wizard asks you about the “Old archive dir”, make sure to set it to the archive dir in the indico-legacy directory.

...
If you are upgrading from Indico 1.2, please specify the path to the
ArchiveDir of the old indico version.  Leave this empty if you are not
upgrading.
Old archive dir: /opt/indico-legacy/archive
...

Running indico-migrate

First of all, make sure that you are using the user and virtualenv created using the step “Install Indico” and that the legacy dir is owned by this user:

chown -R indico /opt/indico-legacy
su - indico
source ~/.venv/bin/activate

You should then install the package using:

pip install indico-migrate

indico-migrate requires a series of parameters that have to be tuned according to your current setup. We now provide a list of values that should work in most standard Indico installations. However, please carefully read the documentation of the indico-migrate command, to make sure there are no option conflicts with your setup.

Most frequenty, indico-migrate postgresql:///indico file:///opt/indico-legacy/db/Data.fs will work, followed by the following parameters:

  • --archive-dir /opt/indico-legacy/archive
  • --storage-backend legacy
  • --default-email default@<organization-hostname>
  • --default-currency EUR
  • --symlink-target ~/archive/legacy_symlinks/
  • --symlink-backend legacy-symlinks
  • --migrate-broken-events (optional - use it if you want to migrate events that don’t belong to any category in v1.2. If any such events exist, the will be added to a new category named Lost & Found.

(don’t forget to replace <organization-hostname> with the e-mail hostname of your organization)

An example:

indico-migrate postgresql:///indico file:///opt/indico-legacy/db/Data.fs --archive-dir /opt/indico-legacy/archive --storage-backend legacy --default-email default@acme.example.com --default-currency EUR --symlink-target ~/archive/legacy_symlinks/ --symlink-backend legacy-symlinks --migrate-broken-events

Note

If for some reason the migration fails, indico-migrate will ask you whether you would like to post an error report on a public pastebin (Gist). The link will not be advertised and only the log information that was shown on screen (plus the exception traceback that was printed) will be included. If you are not comfortable with letting indico-migrate post this on a public pastebin, you can always send us your migration.log file (which gets generated automatically).

Post-migration work

After the migration is done you may need to apply some adjustments in your indico.conf. You may want to read our guide on how to configure an Identity/Authentication provider.

We really recommend as well that you move your old Indico archive (/opt/indico-legacy/archive) inside your new Indico directory:

mv /opt/indico-legacy/archive /opt/indico/legacy-archive

The legacy archive will remain read-only. You should update your indico.conf (STORAGE_BACKENDS option) to reflect the new path:

STORAGE_BACKENDS = {
    # ...
    'legacy': 'fs-readonly:/opt/indico/legacy-archive'
    # ...
}

Sanitizing HTML

Indico 2.0 uses Markdown for the descriptions of contributions and categories. Contribution descriptions that previously contained HTML will still work, but new ones will only support Markdown syntax (including basic HTML). As for the descriptions of categories, they are interpreted as Markdown as of version 2.0, which means that some existing data may be broken. In order to make the lives of users who are migrating easier, we have included with indico-migrate a command that automatically performs the migration of Category descriptions to Markdown.

First of all, let’s see what would be the impact of running the command:

indico-html-sanitize --dry-run -v -l log.html category_descriptions

By opening log.html you will be able to check if there are any special cases that will need manual intervention. If you’re happy with the changes, you can just choose to save them:

indico-html-sanitize category_descriptions

Removing old data

Even if you’re sure the migration succeeded and all data was kept, please keep around the backup of your ZODB you made at the beginning of this guide. After and only after having moved the legacy archive to the new Indico dir and stored a backup of your ZODB in a safe place, you can proceed to delete the old /opt/indico directory:

rm -rf /opt/indico-legacy