How to capture tools release to trigger upgrade?

Question

We capture our applications release by using commits from source code management, new package into the artifactory system etc.,

How can we capture my tools release from vendor so that I will trigger my upgrade script to upgrade my tools itself, for ex: upgrading Jenkins whenever new release available from Jenkins itself?

List of tools am expecting to upgrade:

1. Jenkins
2. GitHub Enterprise
3. Atlassian Jira
4. Atlassian Bamboo
5. Atlassian BitBucket Server

Basically, continuous deployment(with proper pipeline including testing) to production without human interaction for these tools.

Note: I am looking for some example, my requirement is for more than 10 tools. So for Jenkins, it will be Linux and Ubuntu.

Answer 1

For tools which don't offer access to a source code management repository that you can automatically query for updates you could start with a manual trigger, then take a closer look for how is that trigger activated by humans and maybe automate the task:

• there could be upgrade email notifications sent to a subscriber list. An automatic email processing entity could be subscribed to get these messages and distil them into an automatic trigger

• the tool itself may performs such checks, maybe displaying messages in its log(s). In such case an automated tool could be parsing the log and derive an automatic trigger from it. If the upgrade availability is displayed in a GUI it's may be more difficult, but not impossible, to automate that as well

• the tool provider may (or could be persuaded to) offer a programmatic way to query for or be notified about upgrades - API, webhook, service, etc

I'd suggest keeping the human monitoring and ability to activate those triggers in parallel with the automated system - just in case there are unexpected changes rendering the automatic triggers ineffective. Such monitoring could be more relaxed (say once a week/month), just as a precautionary safety net.

Answer 2

From your list of tools:

Jenkins and Github have apt/yum repositories you can use to install and upgrade.

For Atlassian products, best up to date information about repositories I can found is This ShipIt experiment and it seems unlikely to change from this forum post
The workaround may be parsing the mailing list to update the deploy.

Now if you really want something automated to handle the installation and configuration of your tools, you can try a Configuration Management System like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt.

For Chef I know better, there's cookbooks for Jira and Confluence maintained.
For the rest you'll be on your own writing the bits to deploy and configure.

This means having 4 CI/CD systems (at least), two 'groups' validating each other, as a pipeline won't be able to validate and upgrade itself properly (inception). That sounds overkill in my opinion.

At the end of the day, there's no silver bullet for all and every software you may use, each will have its own particularity and way to be installed and you'll have to workaround those bits.