GitLab releases, at least, a new security update every month, a week after the feature release. They also release as many additional security updates as necessary. Some of them are critical, and you will be encouraged to update ASAP.
Our instance is Omnibus flavor, so we can handle updates via package manager 1.
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
1 This will launch GitLab’s own script, which will take care of backing up and reconfiguring the instance.
If the instance is unstable or misbehaves after an upgrade, please run
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure.
Sometimes, when upgrading two versions in a row, the process can fail with a message like that:
gitlab preinstall: It seems you are upgrading from 16.6 to 16.8.
gitlab preinstall: It is required to upgrade to the latest 16.7.x version first before proceeding.
gitlab preinstall: Please follow the upgrade documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/index
.html#upgrade-paths
In that case, we need to specify the proper version. To search it, use:
sudo apt list -a gitlab-ce | head -n6
Once we get the package version, we install it with:
sudo apt install gitlab-ce=<version>-ce.0
When installing last version, we could back to
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
The availability of the new update is displayed in the GitLab UI.
In addition, you can subscribe to the GitLab’s CE releases mail list or RSS.