Upgrade

To set up a deployment, ESS provides various Kustomize overlays These overlays can act as the base for major/minor upgrades as well as for the initial installation.

See also Release Notes.

Important Inputs may change per versions. For example, a new input file may be added or new input may be required in an existing input file. Always review the contents of the inputs/ folder when performing the installation/upgrades.

Procedure

Note Both the installation and the upgrade tutorials follow the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practice for managing the system and assumes the ESS installation directory is under source control.

The tutorial illustrates the steps assuming GitHub as the source control system.

Step 1: Prepare the Installation Directory

1. Go to your ESS installation directory.

   cd ${HOME}/ess

2. Checkout a new branch.

3. Remove all files in this branch to have an empty ${HOME}/ess directory.

Important

Ensure that the directory is empty.

1. Login to Inrupt’s private Docker registry. When prompted for your password, enter your entitlement token :

   docker login  --username <userid> docker.software.inrupt.com

2. Get the latest 2.6 version of the inrupt-kustomizer :

ESS uses three-element version descriptors for its Kubernetes images, corresponding to the release versions (i.e., semantic versions of Major.Minor.Patch). As such, to get the latest version, you must use the specific patch version.

docker pull docker.software.inrupt.com/inrupt-kustomizer:2.6.0

6. Initialize an empty installation directory with a base overlay for your environment:

Important If the directory is not empty, the inrupt-kustomizer does not attempt to initialize the directory with the base configuration files.

docker run -it -v ${HOME}/ess:/kustomize docker.software.inrupt.com/inrupt-kustomizer:2.6.0

Follow the prompts to install the base overlay for your upgrade version, same as the initial installation.

Step 2: Provision an initial Service Account

Required for ESS 2.6.0+

The Platform Management service requires a Service Account to be configured before deployment. This Service Account enables the Platform Management API for user provisioning operations.

Before deploying ESS, you must:

1. Create a user account in your IdP for the Platform Management Service Account

   • Choose a username (e.g., platform-service, provision-service)

   • This account will be used exclusively by the Platform Management service

   • The account does not require special privileges in the IdP

2. Configure the Service Account username in your deployment

   • The username must be set in the INRUPT_PLATFORM_ACCOUNT_PROVISION_SERVICE_USERNAME environment variable

   • This configuration is stored in the inputs/platform-management-secrets.env file

   • The service will fail to start if this configuration is not set

Critical Security Requirement

The Service Account username creates the binding between ESS and your IdP. You must create the corresponding user account in your IdP before deploying ESS.

Failing to do this could allow malicious users to claim the Service Account username, leading to unauthorized administrative access to your ESS deployment.

Example Configuration:

# In inputs/platform-management-secrets.env
INRUPT_PLATFORM_ACCOUNT_PROVISION_SERVICE_USERNAME=provision-service

For more information about the Platform Management service and Service Accounts, see Platform Management API.

Step 3: Update Inputs and Build

Important Inputs may change per versions. For example, a new input file may be added or new input may be required in an existing input file. Always review the contents of the inputs/ folder when performing the installation/upgrades.

During the initialization, Inrupt generates a readme.txt file in the installation directory. The file provides instructions on updating inputs for your deployment and building the deployment file.

1. Go to the installation directory.

   cd ${HOME}/ess

2. Using the instructions in the readme.txt file, update the inputs in the base overlay for your deployment. As noted in the previous section, make sure the newly created Service Account for the Platform Management Service is added to the inputs.

3. If upgrading from ESS 2.3, be sure to remove the following section from your inputs/kustomization.yaml.

   - name: input-certificates
     behavior: merge
     envs:
       - certificates.env

Warning

CRITICAL SECURITY REQUIREMENT

NEVER commit files containing secrets such as .env or JWT to version control. These files must be managed securely.

As part of updating the inputs for your deployment:

1. Review the template secret files

2. Set strong secrets for the values, such as strong passwords

3. Store the secret securely outside your repository using one of these methods:

   • Cloud secrets management service

   • Enterprise secrets vault solution

   • Kubernetes Secrets with encryption at rest

   • Secure file system with restricted access (development only)

4. Configure your deployment to retrieve credentials from your secure storage at runtime

5. Add the secrets files to your .gitignore file immediately

Kafka Message Encryption ESS’ services communicate with each other by sending messages through Kafka.

By default, Inrupt enables data encryption for all data that pass through the Kafka messaging system.

You MUST set the data encryption key values to a strong password.

Update any other inputs as specified in the kafka-credentials.env file.

For more information on the Kafka configurations, see ESS’ Kafka Configuration.

1. After updating the inputs, build the deployment file per the instructions in the readme.txt file.

2. Commit all changes in the directory to source control.

Important Ensure that the repo is private.

Step 4: Optional. Customize Your Deployment Configuration

Optionally, you can further customize your ESS deployment using Kustomize overlays, such as to use certificates from an official Certificate Authority (CA).

Note You can opt to customize after setting up a base deployment.

For examples on customizing your deployment with overlays, see Customize ESS .

Step 5: Deploy

After you have built the deployment file, you can deploy.

1. If not already, go to the installation directory:

   cd ${HOME}/ess

2. Deploy to your Kubernetes environment:

   kubectl apply -f kustomized.yaml

Tip The deploy operation is idempotent. If the deploy operation does not complete successfully, you can safely retry the operation.

Warning: Self-signed Certificates The provided base overlays create self-signed certificates. These self-signed certificates are for development purposes only. In production, ESS should be run with certificates from an official Certificate Authority (CA). For an example of how you can customize your deployment to use your production certificates, see Use Official Certificate Authority.

3. You can view the ESS components and services that are running:

kubectl -n ess get all

4. For local standalone deployments , add the ESS service domains to the /etc/hosts file on your local machine.

The following steps are specific to Linux operating system.

1. Get your local Kubernetes cluster IP address:

   K8_IP=$(kubectl get nodes -o jsonpath="{.items[*].status.addresses[?(@.type=='InternalIP')].address}")

2. Get a list of the ESS service domains:

   ESS_DOMAINS=$(grep "host: " kustomized.yaml | awk '{print $3}' | sort -u | tr -d '\r' | tr '\n' ' ')

3. Backup your /etc/hosts file:

   sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak

4. Update the /etc/hosts:

   sudo sed -n -e '/# ESS-DOMAINS-BEGIN/,/# ESS-DOMAINS-END/!p' -e '$a# ESS-DOMAINS-BEGIN\n'"$K8_IP $ESS_DOMAINS"'\n# ESS-DOMAINS-END' -i /etc/hosts

1. To verify, go to https://start.{ESS DOMAIN}/.