Create protocol for regular upgrade of REDCap components

[wibeasley]

spun off from Thomas's post:

On the big meeting yesterday (eg, Wilson, Thomas N (HSC); Beasley, William H.; Moore, Randy W. (HSC); Steward, Shad (HSC); Mack, Cliff W (HSC); Miller, Tony D. (HSC); Bard, David E. (HSC)), Randy, Shad, and other supported a protocol that would update the REDCap components every 6 months, with ad hoc updates whenever there was a serious security update.

There are several components that need to be updated, such as

1. REDCap code itself
2. MySQL
3. phpMySQL (ie, a web GUI for MySQL; a relevant forum discussion)
4. PHP
5. Linux (which is Red Hat, I think)

@thomasnwilson, are there any extra layers that need to be installed/updated explicitly, such as JDBC/ODBC drivers?

[thomasnwilson]

@wibeasley Not that I am aware of.

[wibeasley]

Brainstorming ideas:

1. Can Campus IT schedule a VM snapshot for the second Monday of every month?
2. We need a better series of scripts that allows longitudinal projects to easily migrate between production and development boxes. Both directions are important -production to dev is important to test for breaking changes in new versions. Current barriers are
   1. Events
   2. Calculated variables
   3. User access groups
   4. Calendar entries
   5. Arms

[wibeasley]

Rough plan

1. Upgrade all three instances once a month. The devbox gets the freshest copy released by Rob Taylor. The two production boxes move to the version that had been on the devbox for the previous month.
2. @thomasnwilson does the monthly REDCap upgrades
3. Campus IT upgrades the other five components every six months (eg, MySql, Linux)
4. @thomasnwilson notifies Pravina before each upgrade -ideally she reads Rob Taylor's "what's new" for each version.
5. Pravina is responsible for notifying the project owners for the enterprise instance. @thomasnwilson is responsible for notifying the project owners for the (a) BBMC instance and the (b) devbox.
6. Pravina and @thomasnwilson can decide to suspend upgrading their production instance for up to one month. This will allow (the rare cases of) when a new REDCap version might break functionality of a production project. However the devbox will always be updated monthly, regardless of any changes breaking.

[wibeasley]

@thomasnwilson, you've done something like this already, haven't you? If so, can you share it and close the issue?