How to keep track of the 'current version' when using multiple types of artifacts

General Discussions
1

The topic might not have been clear, so let me explain the scenario…

We’re using mender to download a number of different things to our devices:

  • The rootfs image, and
  • Multiple applications that get installed in the data partition (using an overlayfs). We’ve implemented a custom update module called ‘apps_sqfs’ to handle the installation steps.

The problem that I’ve run into is that the ‘device’ view within the Mender web interface appears to only show the latest deployment. Example:

  • Deployment#1 - update the rootfs. Mender will show the “current_version=distro_v3.5.2”.
  • Deployment#2 - deploy an application called “billy_v1.1”. Mender will show “current_version=billy_v1.1”
  • Deployment#3 - deploy another application called 'bob_v2.1". Mender will show “current_version=bob_v2.1”
  • Deployment#4 - deploy an application update called “billy_v1.4”. Mender will show “current_version=billy_v1.4”

Questions:

  • Is there a way to see the latest deployed version of each different type of artifact ?
    ** Version of the rootfs
    ** Version of the app called “billy”
    ** Version of the app called “bob”
  • Does mender have any way of knowing that “billy_v1.4” supersedes “billy_v1.1” ?
  • Is there a way to show the deployment history for a particular device, so that someone can manually determine what the latest version of each application has been deployed ?

I’m currently still using mender server 2.5.1 and haven’t seen anything in the release notes for 2.7 and 3.0 related to this topic. If I’ve overlooked some docs, please kindly point me in the right direction.

2

Hi,
you should have support for custom software versioning, see here for the documentation.

:smiley:

3

Thanks.
Based on the docs that you provided, the ‘Software Versioning’ feature appears to have been introduced in v2.6. I’ll update our test environment and experiment.

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