Upgrade in an air-gapped environment

Upgrade Che on a cluster with no internet access by mirroring updated container images and Operator catalogs to your private registry before running the upgrade.

Prerequisites

You have the Che instance installed on OpenShift using the chectl --installer operator method in the eclipse-che project. See Install Che in a restricted environment on Kubernetes.

Procedure

The OpenShift cluster has at least 64 GB of disk space.
The OpenShift cluster is ready to operate on a restricted network. See About disconnected installation mirroring and Using Operator Lifecycle Manager on restricted networks.

An active oc session with administrative permissions to the OpenShift cluster. See Getting started with the OpenShift CLI.
An active oc registry session to the registry.redhat.io Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. See: Red Hat Container Registry authentication.

opm. See Installing the opm CLI.
jq. See Downloading jq.
podman. See Podman Installation Instructions.
skopeo version 1.6 or higher. See Installing Skopeo.
An active skopeo session with administrative access to the private Docker registry. Authenticating to a registry, and Mirroring images for a disconnected installation.
chectl for Che version 7.120. See Install the chectl management tool.

Procedure

Download and execute the mirroring script to install a custom Operator catalog and mirror the related images: prepare-restricted-environment.sh.

$ bash prepare-restricted-environment.sh \
  --devworkspace_operator_index quay.io/devfile/devworkspace-operator-index:release-digest\
  --devworkspace_operator_version "v0.42.0" \
  --prod_operator_index "registry.access.redhat.com/redhat/community-operator-index:v4.18" \
  --prod_operator_package_name "eclipse-che" \
  --prod_operator_bundle_name "eclipse-che" \
  --prod_operator_version "v7.120.0" \
  --my_registry "<my_registry>" (1)

1	The private Docker registry where the images will be mirrored

In all running workspaces in the Che previous minor version instance, save and push changes back to the Git repositories.
Stop all workspaces in the Che previous minor version instance.

Run the following command:

$ chectl server:update --che-operator-image="$TAG" -n eclipse-che --k8spodwaittimeout=1800000

Verification

Navigate to the Che instance.
The 7.120 version number is visible at the bottom of the page.

Additional resources