Switch from nightly build to stable

Hello,

I believe the recommended version of the netdata agent is to run stable, as opposed to nightly builds, in a production environment. We use the agent in conjunction with NetData Cloud.

What is the recommended way to switch from nightly builds to stable? Do I need to remove the agent completely and re-install? Is the kickstart script still the best option?

Thank you in advance!

If you’re using our native packages, then you just need to update the repository configuration to point to the stable repo instead of the nightly repo, and reinstall the package. If this is the case and you had installed using the kickstart script, you can easily do this by installing netdata-repo using your system package manager (this should uninstall netdata-repo-edge at the same time).

If you’re not using our native packages, then the most reliable way to change between the stable and nightly channels is to use the kickstart script to reinstall as outlined in our documentation.

@Austin_Hemmelgarn

Thank you for the quick response.

I do normally install using the kickstart scrip. I have not seen any documentation in regard to your repos. Do you have a link for that?

My goal was to update the agent in addition to switching from nightly builds to stable, but it seems that your docs recommend the nightly builds. I don’t particularly like the fact the agent restarts nightly since it causes the Netdata cloud to alert that communication is lost, although brief.

I find myself having to review many emails every morning to confirm whether the alerts can be ignored, or whether a server actually needs my attention.

Will the nightly restarts stop if we disable the agent’s automatic updates?

Thanks for your input.
Amit

Hey, i just wanted to let you guys know, there is propably a bug within the “add Nodes” from netdata cloud.

While adding, you get a command previewed to add a node (Linux for example), first, nightly ist preselected (which is not good in my opinion) second, which is much more buggy, even changing to stable, which changes the previes from “–nightly-channel” to “–stable-channel” does not change the actual copied string when clicking “copy-button”.

I sure had to install/uninstall 3 times before i noticed that.

Thanks for reporting this @towerplease , we will follow-up on it.
Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.

Bug report - [Bug]: Switch from nightly build to stable doesn't impact "Copy" output · Issue #940 · netdata/netdata-cloud · GitHub

first, nightly ist preselected (which is not good in my opinion)

The rationale behind this choice is that for us to be able to test the several possible OS, architectures, etc. we need the nightly versions to be the default, so most of the users running this. Even though we do extensive testing we can’t cover all the scenarios out there.

Bug has been fixed. Once again thanks for reporting it