Keeping BOA current

Here's the good news first: most of the time you do nothing. BOA is built to keep itself up to date. There's a piece of it called SKYNET that quietly downloads updates, patches security holes, and repairs broken bits of the stack around the clock — on its own, without you logging in.

So this page is short on chores. It's mostly here to explain what's happening behind your back (so nothing surprises you), and to walk you through the one thing you might occasionally do by hand: run a full upgrade yourself.

Leave SKYNET on — this is what keeps your box healthy

SKYNET is on by default on every fresh BOA install. Leave it on. It is the single biggest reason a BOA box can look after itself.

While it's on, and without you touching anything, SKYNET:

  • Keeps BOA's own tools fresh, so the upgrade commands always know the latest steps (it refreshes these every few minutes).
  • Checks hosted Drupal 7 sites for known security holes every hour and patches them automatically.
  • Watches core services (like the DNS resolver) and restarts or repairs them if they fall over.
  • Emails you when a new BOA release is available.

You don't schedule any of this. You don't run any of it. It just happens.

Why "turn it off" is how boxes rot. Every job in that list becomes your job the moment SKYNET is off: you'd have to watch for BOA releases yourself, patch every Drupal 7 site by hand the day a vulnerability is announced, and notice broken services before your visitors do. What actually happens is people forget — and months later a box that was quietly rotting has a security incident. If you take one thing from this page: don't turn SKYNET off.

There is an off switch, but it's not for beginners and there's almost no good reason to reach for it. It lives at the end of this page under Going further.

Your weekly rhythm: nothing, mostly

Here's what "keeping current" looks like day to day for a self-hosted BOA box:

  1. SKYNET keeps everything patched and healthy in the background — every day, automatically.
  2. When a new BOA release lands, SKYNET emails you. On the LTS and PRO editions, tagged releases can even roll out to your box on their own.
  3. Once in a while — after a long gap, or when an email or a support answer tells you to — you run one full upgrade by hand. That's the rest of this page.

That's genuinely it. There's no weekly checklist you're neglecting. If you never touched the box again, SKYNET would keep patching it.

Running a full upgrade by hand

Sometimes you'll want to run the upgrade yourself — for example the very first time after a fresh install, after the box has been left alone for a long time, or when you've been told to. It's a copy-paste job. Here's the whole thing.

Step 1 — log in as root, in a screen session

Log into your box over SSH as root (not with sudo in front of each command — be root, or run sudo -i once to become root). Then start a screen session:

screen

Why screen matters: an upgrade can run for a long time, and if your SSH connection drops halfway through, a plain shell would kill the upgrade and leave your box half-done — which is genuinely painful to recover. Inside screen, the upgrade keeps running even if your laptop goes to sleep or your wifi hiccups. You can reconnect and pick it back up. Always start with screen.

Step 2 — refresh BOA's own tools

Paste this exactly:

wget -qO- https://files.boa.io/BOA.sh.txt | bash

This downloads the freshest copies of BOA's upgrade tools. It's quick. Do it every time before an upgrade so the tools know the latest steps.

Step 3 — run the two upgrade commands

Now the upgrade itself. On the free LTS edition it's exactly these two lines, in this order:

barracuda up-lts
octopus up-lts all force
  • The first line upgrades the system and the Aegir control panel (the web stack — Nginx, the database, PHP, and BOA's own frontend).
  • The second line upgrades each of your hosted sites' platforms.

Run the first, wait for it to finish, then run the second.

On the licensed PRO edition, the verbs are up-pro instead of up-lts (barracuda up-pro and octopus up-pro all force). Same shape, same order. If you don't have a PRO license, you're on LTS — use up-lts. These are the only upgrade verbs BOA has; you can always ask the tools themselves with barracuda help and octopus help.

Do the full upgrade the first time — no shortcuts. BOA has faster, narrower upgrade modes for experienced operators, but the first upgrade (or the first after a long gap) must be the plain full commands above. Skipping steps too early can leave the box half-upgraded. Just run the two lines as written.

What you'll see, and what's normal

The upgrade prints a lot of output and takes a while — often the better part of an hour, sometimes longer on a slow box or after a big gap. Along the way:

  • Long quiet stretches are normal. BOA will sit apparently doing nothing — compiling PHP, rebuilding the database, fetching packages — with no new lines for several minutes at a time. Do not panic, do not interrupt it. It has not frozen. Killing it here is exactly how boxes get left half-upgraded. Let it run.
  • The box may reboot itself as part of the process, especially if a new system kernel was installed. That's expected. Your SSH session will drop; wait a minute or two, reconnect, and if an upgrade was still in progress, resume your screen session (screen -r).

The rule of thumb: start it, then leave it alone until it clearly finishes.

How to tell it finished cleanly

You'll know the upgrade is done when:

  • The command returns you to a normal shell prompt (no more scrolling output), and
  • A quick health check looks right:
boa info

boa info prints a summary of your box — versions, the database engine, and whether a reboot is still pending. If it lists a pending (next) kernel, a new kernel is installed but not yet active: reboot to switch to it with BOA's tidy reboot command:

boa reboot

If boa info runs, shows sensible versions, and reports no pending reboot, your upgrade landed cleanly and you're done.

Want an email instead of watching the screen? BOA has a silent, logged upgrade mode that shows nothing in the terminal and emails you (at the admin address you set during install) once it finishes. That's the mode the scheduled auto-upgrades use, and it's handy for long runs — but the plain interactive commands above don't send that email, so for a hand-run upgrade watch the prompt and boa info as described. The silent mode is covered under the escalation links in Going further.

Upgrading the database to a new major version

Every so often a BOA or OS upgrade needs the database engine (Percona) moved up a major version. This is a bigger deal than a normal upgrade — take a fresh backup first, and do it only when you know it's required (an upgrade will tell you, or refuse to continue until you've done it).

At a beginner level, the move is a version-numbered upgrade command, run the same way as above (in screen, as root, after refreshing the tools). You cannot jump straight from the oldest to the newest — you go one step at a time:

barracuda up-lts system percona-8.0
barracuda up-lts system percona-8.4

Run the first line, let it finish, then the second. There's a short window where the database is stopped while it swaps versions and repairs its tables; your sites reconnect once it's back. The exact sequencing (which OS versions allow which jumps, when it's safe, what to check) is more than a beginner box needs to memorise — see the escalation link below before you attempt a database major upgrade, and always snapshot the whole box first.

Going further

You've now got everything a self-hosted box needs day to day: leave SKYNET on, let it keep you patched, and run a full upgrade by hand when you're told to. The topics below go beyond "install, upgrade, recover" — they assume you're comfortable with Aegir and Linux internals, and root on the box.

Related

  • Start here — what running your own BOA box means, if you're still deciding.
  • Before you install — the OS and box choices you made earlier that shape what your upgrades look like.
  • Essential settings — the handful of .cnf knobs a beginner sets, including where the admin email that upgrade notices go to lives.
  • Discontinued features — things older BOA guides mention that no longer apply.