Update Drone CI to latest version

📆2019-06-14🍱server

Drone is a great open source CI/CD running in a docker container that is both easy to use and install. Because it runs in a container and doesn’t require a lot of dependencies installed on your system it’s really easy to update to a new version.

If you haven’t installed Drone yet you can do that by reading this post.

Navigate to Docker Hub and check if there is a new version available. You can read the changelog at GitHub to make sure there are no breaking changes. If you’d like to use the new version start by downloading it (we assume the latest version is 1.2.1 in this example but change accordingly).

docker pull drone/drone:1.2.1

When the download is complete we need to tell our startup script to use the new container instead. Open the docker-compose file for Drone.

sudo vim /etc/drone/docker-compose.yml

Here we need to change what image to use, we change the image property to this:

image: drone/drone:1.2.1

Then we simply restart Drone.

sudo systemctl stop drone
sudo systemctl start drone

You can then validate that everything works by either navigate to the GUI in your browser or check the status by typing:

sudo systemctl status drone

Cleaning up old docker images

It can be a good idea to remove old, unused images when they are not used anymore. Drone itself doesn’t take up much disk space but because it uses all kind of images internally it can quickly grow in size. For example building a node project requires the node docker image which is around 1 GB in size. No need to save outdated images if your projects don’t need them.

You can see all images by typing:

docker images -a

If it doesn’t have an associated tag it usually isn’t needed and can be removed, but that is not always the case. Another application might use it as well so make sure it’s safe to remove it before you do.

To remove all danglig images (without a tag) you can do that with:

docker images purge

If you want to remove a single image, like the old Drone image we don’t use anymore, you can do that by removing it by the image ID. Let’s say our old Drone version, 1.2.0, we don’t use anymore has the image ID 4a2d1fc1233d. Then we can remove it by that ID.

docker rmi 4a2d1fc1233d

You are now running a new version of Drone and you have so much disk space left for other cool stuff 😍