Upgrading to 3.0 — Cyrus IMAP 3.0.11 (stable) documentation

- Home
- Download
- Contribute
- Support
- Cyrus SASL

# Upgrading to 3.0

Note

This guide assumes that you are familiar and comfortable with administration of a Cyrus installation, and system administration in general.

It assumes you are intalling from source or tarball. If you want to install from package, use the upgrade instructions from the package provider.

Upgrading: an overview

- 1. Preparation
  - Installation from tarball
  - How are you planning on upgrading?
  - Do What As Who?
- 2. Install new 3.0 Cyrus
- 3. Shut down existing Cyrus
- 4. Backup and Copy existing data
- 5. Copy config files and update
- 6. Upgrade specific items
- 7. Start new 3.0 Cyrus and verify
- 8. Reconstruct databases and cache
- 9. Do you want any new features?
- 10. Upgrade complete
- Special note for Murder configurations

Note

For those upgrading from 2.3.X; newer releases of Cyrus IMAP will use significantly more memory per selected mailbox. This is not an error or bug; it’s a feature. The newer code is holding more data and metadata in memory for purposes of faster access to more of the mailbox. This is not a memory leak.

## 1. Preparation

Things to consider before you begin:

### Installation from tarball

You will need to install from our packaged tarball. We provide a full list of libraries that Debian requires, but we aren’t able to test all platforms: you may find you need to install additional or different libraries to support v3.0.

### How are you planning on upgrading?

Ideally, you will do a sandboxed test installation of 3.0 using a snapshot of your existing data before you switch off your existing installation. The rest of the instructions are assuming a sandboxed 3.0 installation.

If you’re familiar with replication, and your current installation is 2.4 or newer, you can set up your existing installation to replicate data to a new 3.0 installation and failover to the new installation when you’re ready. The replication protocol has been kept backwards compatible.

If you are upgrading in place, you will need to shut down Cyrus entirely while you install the new package. If your old installation was using Berkeley DB format databases, you will need to convert or upgrade the databases before you upgrade. Cyrus v3.0 does not support Berkeley DB at all.

### Do What As Who?

Since the various files, databases, directories, etc. used by Cyrus must be readable and writable as the `cyrus` user, please make sure to always perform Cyrus commands as the `cyrus` user, and not as `root`. In our documentation, we will always reference Cyrus commands in this form – cyr_info(8) – before using examples of them, so you’ll know that those commands must be run as the `cyrus` user.

Doing so in most systems is as simple as using either the `su` or `sudo` commands, like so:

    su cyrus -c "/usr/local/bin/cyr_info conf-lint -C /etc/imapd.conf -M /etc/cyrus.conf"
    sudo -u cyrus /usr/local/bin/cyr_info conf-lint -C /etc/imapd.conf -M /etc/cyrus.conf

In this document, however, there are also several command examples which should or must be run as `root`. These are always standard *nix commands, such as `rsync` or `scp`.

We strongly recommend that you read this entire document before upgrading.

## 2. Install new 3.0 Cyrus

Download the release 3.0 package tarball.

Fetch the libraries for your platform. The full list (including all optional packages) for Debian is:

    sudo apt-get install -y autoconf automake autotools-dev bash-completion bison build-essential comerr-dev \
    debhelper flex g++ git gperf groff heimdal-dev libbsd-resource-perl libclone-perl libconfig-inifiles-perl \
    libcunit1-dev libdatetime-perl libdb-dev libdigest-sha-perl libencode-imaputf7-perl libfile-chdir-perl \
    libglib2.0-dev libical-dev libio-socket-inet6-perl libio-stringy-perl libjansson-dev libldap2-dev \
    libmysqlclient-dev libnet-server-perl libnews-nntpclient-perl libpam0g-dev libpcre3-dev libsasl2-dev \
    libsnmp-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libtest-unit-perl libtool libunix-syslog-perl liburi-perl \
    libxapian-dev libxml-generator-perl libxml-xpath-perl libxml2-dev libwrap0-dev libzephyr-dev lsb-base \
    net-tools perl php-cli php-curl pkg-config po-debconf tcl-dev \
    transfig uuid-dev vim wamerican wget xutils-dev zlib1g-dev sasl2-bin rsyslog sudo acl telnet

If you’re on another platform and can provide the list of dependencies, please let us know via a GitHub issue or documentation pull request or send mail to the developer list.

Follow the general install instructions.

Note

It’s best to ensure your new Cyrus will not start up automatically if your server restarts in the middle of the upgrade.

How this is best achieved will depend upon your OS and distro, but may involve something like `systemctl disable cyrus-imapd` or `update-rc.d cyrus-imapd disable`

## 3. Shut down existing Cyrus

Shut down your existing Cyrus installation with its init script or whatever method you normally use.

This is necessary to guarantee a clean data snapshot.

## 4. Backup and Copy existing data

We recommend backing up all your data before continuing.

- Sieve scripts
- Config files
- Mail spool
- Cyrus Databases

(You do already have a backup strategy in place, right? Once you’re on 3.0, you can consider using the new inbuilt backup tools.)

Copy all of this to the new instance, using `rsync` or similar tools.

Note

Cyrus keeps its data and databases in various locations, some of which may be tailored by your configuration. Please consult File & Directory Locations for guidance on where data lives in your current installation.

For example, to copy from an existing Debian or Ubuntu installation using their standard locations, you might execute this series of commands on the new server (where “oldimap” is the name of the old server):

    rsync -aHv oldimap:/var/lib/cyrus/. /var/lib/cyrus/.
    rsync -aHv oldimap:/var/spool/cyrus/. /var/spool/cyrus/.

You don’t need to copy the following databases as Cyrus 3.0 will recreate these for you automatically:

- duplicate delivery (deliver.db),
- TLS cache (tls_sessions.db),
- PTS cache (ptscache.db),
- STATUS cache (statuscache.db).

Note

You may wish to consider relocating these four databases to ephemeral storage, such as `/run/cyrus` (Debian/Ubuntu) or `/var/run/cyrus` or whatever suitable tmpfs is provided on your distro. It will place less IO load on your disks and run faster.

Warning

Please be warned that some packages place tasks such as `tlsprune` (tls_prune(8)) in the `START{}` stanza of cyrus.conf(5). This will cause a startup problem if the `tls_sessions_db` is not present. The solution to this is to remove the `tlsprune` task from `START{}` and schedule it in `EVENTS{}`, further down.

## 5. Copy config files and update

Again, check the locations on your specific installation. For example, on FreeBSD systems, the configuration files imapd.conf(5) and cyrus.conf(5) are in `/usr/local/etc`, rather than `/etc/`. Run this command on the old server:

    scp /etc/cyrus.conf /etc/imapd.conf newimap:/etc/

Using the cyr_info(8) command, check to see if your imapd.conf file contains any deprecated options. Run this command on the new server:

    cyr_info conf-lint -C <path to imapd.conf> -M <path to cyrus.conf>

You need to provide both imapd.conf and cyrus.conf so that conf-lint knows the names of all your services and can check service-specific overrides.

To check your entire system’s configuration you can use the conf-all action. This command takes all the system defaults, along with anything you have provided overrides for in your config files:

    cyr_info conf-all -C <path to imapd.conf> -M <path to cyrus.conf>

Important config options: `unixhierarchysep:` and `altnamespace:` defaults have changed in imapd.conf(5). Implications are outlined in the Note in User Namespace Mode and Switching the Alternative Namespace. Please also see “Sieve Scripts,” below.

- unixhierarchysep: on
- altnamespace: on

Note

If your installation is using groups, don’t turn `reverseacls:` on. Reverseacl support only works well for sites without groups.

In cyrus.conf(5) move idled from the START section to the DAEMON section.

## 6. Upgrade specific items

- Special-Use flags

  > If your 2.4 imapd.conf(5) made use of the `xlist-XX` directive(s), you can convert these to per-user special-use annotations in your new install with the cvt_xlist_specialuse(8) tool

- Sieve Scripts

  > Since defaults for options: `unixhierarchysep:` and `altnamespace:` have changed in imapd.conf(5), you may very likely need to modify any sieve scripts already on your system. Fear not, there’s a tool for this task, called translatesieve(8). This tool can handle situations where either or both of these settings need change. Please consult the man page for details.

  > Consider the following example, where the prior configuration was already using `altnamespace: on`, but was not using `unixhierarchysep: on`:

  >     # su cyrus -c "/usr/lib/cyrus/upgrade/translatesieve -a"
  >     you are using /var/lib/imap/sieve as your sieve directory.
  >     translating sievedir /var/lib/imap/sieve... converting separator from '.' to '/'
  >     not changing name space.
  >     done

Warning

Berkeley db format no longer supported

If you have any databases using Berkeley db, they’ll need to be converted to skiplist or flat in your existing installation. And then optionally converted to whatever final format you’d like in your 3.0 installation.

Databases potentially affected: mailboxes, annotations, conversations, quotas.

On old install, prior to migration:

    cvt_cyrusdb /<configdirectory>mailboxes.db berkeley /tmp/new-mailboxes.db skiplist

If you don’t want to use flat or skiplist for 3.0, you can use the new 3.0 cvt_cyrusdb(8) to swap to new format:

    cvt_cyrusdb /tmp/new-mailboxes.db skiplist /<configdirectory>/mailboxes.db <new file format>

Note

The cvt_cyrusdb(8) command does not accept relative paths.

## 7. Start new 3.0 Cyrus and verify

    sudo ./master/master -d

Check `/var/log/syslog` for errors so you can quickly understand potential problems.

When you’re satisfied version 3.0 is running and can see all its data correctly, start the new Cyrus up with your regular init script.

If something has gone wrong, contact us on the mailing list. You can revert to backups and keep processing mail using your old version until you’re able to finish your 3.0 installation.

Note

If you’ve disable your system startup scripts, as recommended in step 2, remember to re-enable them. Use something like `systemctl enable cyrus-imapd` or `update-rc.d cyrus-imapd enable`

## 8. Reconstruct databases and cache

The following steps can each take a long time, so we recommend running them one at a time (to reduce locking contention and high I/O load).

To upgrade all the mailboxes to the latest version. This will take hours, possibly days.

    reconstruct -V max

New configuration: if turning on conversations, you need to create conversations.db for each user.:

    ctl_conversationsdb -b -r

To check (and correct) quota usage:

    quota -f

If you’ve been using CalDAV/CardDAV/all of the DAV from earlier releases, then the user.dav databases need to be reconstructed due to format changes.:

    dav_reconstruct -a

## 9. Do you want any new features?

3.0 comes with many lovely new features. Consider which ones you want to enable. Here are some which may interest you. Check the 3.0 release notes for the full list.

- Backups
- Xapian for searching
- Cross-domain support. See `crossdomains` in imapd.conf(5)

## 10. Upgrade complete

Your upgrade is complete! We have a super-quick survey (3 questions only, anonymous responses) we would love for you to fill out, so we can get a feel for how many Cyrus installations are out there, and how the upgrade process went.

I'll fill in the survey right now (opens in a new window)

## Special note for Murder configurations

If you upgrade murder frontends before you upgrade all the backends, they may advertise features to clients which the backends don’t support, which will cause the commands to fail when they are proxied to the backend.

Generally accepted wisdom when upgrading a Murder configuration is to upgrade all your back end servers first. This can be done one at a time.

Upgrade your mupdate master and front ends last.

If you are upgrading from 2.4, and wish to use XFER to transfer your mailboxes to your new 3.0 server, please consider first upgrading your 2.4 setup to version 2.4.19 or later. Earlier versions of 2.4 do not correctly recognise the 2.5 and 3.0 mailbox versions, and will downgrade mailboxes (losing metadata) in transit. 2.4.19 and later versions correctly recognise 2.5 and 3.0 servers, and will not downgrade mailbox versions in transit.