Obtaining Coder's Nightly Releases

Coder Enterprise has a public nightly release Helm repository that gets updated most weeknights at midnight (central time). Nightly releases may contain unreleased hotfixes and new, undocumented features. All customers are free to use the nightly release for their deployments.

While we make a great effort to test our nightly releases using automated testing and manual testing, sometimes breaking bugs will get automatically released via our nightly release pipeline.

Additionally, any new features that are available in nightly builds may not be up to the standard of more mature features that have been fully released. Some new features may have inconsistent UI or unimplemented controls.

We recommend you backup your database before proceeding with any of the steps on this page.

In some cases, we might manually retract a nightly release from the repository if it is known to cause data loss or has major bugs/instability issues. This will not automatically fix your current release; you will need to revert to a backup and upgrade manually.

Where to Obtain Nightly Releases

Nightly releases are stored in the nightly Helm repository. Images are stored in a publicly accessible gcr.io repository.

Nightly Release Listing

The list of nightly releases is maintained in the Helm repository's index. We automatically prune old nightly releases, so you'll only see a maximum of 100 entries in the index. Helm doesn't have an easy way to list package versions in a repo, so the easiest way to view the index is to obtain it using curl:

$ curl https://helm-nightly.coder.com/index.yaml

apiVersion: v1
entries:
  coder:
  - apiVersion: v2
    created: "2020-09-25T00:02:52.661335099-05:00"
    description: Run Coder in Kubernetes
    digest: 2dd7081a0d4a5106ac458ba1203ca067be19f20d010528cd802e03ea681e8223
    name: coder
    type: application
    urls:
    - https://helm-nightly.coder.com/coder-1.11.0-90-gb0e792c7e-20200924.tgz version: 1.11.0-90-gb0e792c7e-20200924
  - ...
generated: "2020-09-28T00:02:05.129533118-05:00"

The topmost version under entries.coder is the most recent version. In most cases, you'll want to use the most recent nightly.

Each nightly version contains a date at the end in YYYYMMDD format. This version will also be displayed in the Coder Enterprise UI if you click on your name in the top-right corner. When contacting support, the entire version string is crucial so we understand which version you're running.

For automation purposes, you can use the following one-liner to get the current nightly version from the repository:

# Requires curl, yq, jq
$ curl -sS https://helm-nightly.coder.com/index.yaml | yq r --tojson - | jq -r "[.entries.coder | sort_by(.created) | reverse][0][0].version" 

1.11.0-108-g01693c0e2-20200926

Installing a Nightly Release via Helm

If you haven't already added the Helm repo:

$ helm repo add coder-nightly https://helm-nightly.coder.com
"coder-nightly" has been added to your repositories

Then, to install or upgrade to a specific version to the coder namespace (be sure to backup your database before running the following command):

$ helm upgrade --namespace coder coder coder-nightly/coder --version <VERSION> --atomic --install

Release "coder" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
NAME: coder
LAST DEPLOYED: Mon Sep 28 16:38:36 2020
NAMESPACE: coder
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 2
TEST SUITE: None

The --atomic flag here instructs Helm to automatically downgrade if the nightly release fails to become ready within the default timeout of 5 minutes. This automatic downgrade on failure is safe and shouldn't require you to manually downgrade to your database backup if it occurs.

Downgrading to a Standard Release

Downgrading is not something we support at this time. If you need to downgrade to a release for whatever reason, you should revert to the database backup you made prior to installing the nightly release.

If your currently installed nightly version is sufficiently older than a standard release (e.g., more than a week older), you may consider upgrading from the nightly release to the standard release using the standard upgrade procedure.