Question on inplace upgrades using helm charts

[bayer-veera]

Hi Team,

I have evaluating mcp-context-forge for my project. I started from 0.6.0. Everytime I had some trouble trying in-place upgrades using the helm chart then I will do a clean installation. Will this be supported after the major release?

[crivetimihai]

Hi @bayer-veera, thanks for raising this. I can add an explicit chart upgrade runbook. Please share your helm values and current chart version so I can confirm the safest sequence.

[crivetimihai]

Hi @bayer-veera, thanks for your patience. In-place Helm upgrades have been significantly improved since the early releases. Here's the current guidance:

Recommended upgrade procedure:

# 1. Preview changes first (requires helm-diff plugin)
helm plugin install https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff
helm diff upgrade mcp-stack charts/mcp-stack -n mcp-private -f my-values.yaml

# 2. Upgrade
helm upgrade mcp-stack charts/mcp-stack -n mcp-private --wait --timeout 15m

# 3. If something goes wrong
helm rollback mcp-stack 1 -n mcp

Known issues with older upgrades:

• From BETA-2: MinIO label selector changes cause Deployment.apps "<release>-minio" is invalid: spec.selector: field is immutable. Workaround (documented in charts/mcp-stack/CHANGELOG.md:99-112): kubectl delete deployment -n mcp-private mcp-stack-minio (keeps PVC/data), then re-run helm upgrade.

• PostgreSQL safety (now built-in): The chart uses Recreate deployment strategy for PostgreSQL to prevent overlapping old/new DB pods on the same PVC (CHANGELOG.md:115). Graceful shutdown hooks and ReadWriteOncePod access mode are configured by default.

• Database migrations: Alembic migrations run automatically on startup, so schema changes are applied during the upgrade.

Best practice: Always back up your database before major version upgrades. For PostgreSQL, the chart supports MinIO-backed backup/restore when postgres.upgrade.enabled=true and minio.enabled=true.

In-place upgrades should work reliably from RC1 onward. If you're still experiencing issues on the latest release, please share the exact error and chart versions (source and target) and I'll help troubleshoot.