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Rucio Administration Tricks

Rucio container code hot-patching​

The rucio official containers provide a way to hotpatch the source code before running rucio. This behavior may be used to rapidly fix a production deployment without having to wait for the change to be merged and released by the rucio team.

The behavior is very simple: any file found in the /patch/* directory inside the containers will be fed to the patch command-line tool in the order returned by this glob matching.

The procedures described bellow are only intended for temporary fixes. If a permanent change is needed, we highly encourage you to open a pull request in rucio to spare you the toil related to maintaining your own local patch set.

Creating a patch from existing pull request​

Lets assume you run rucio 1.27.3 in production, and you realize there is a bug in the conveyor-poller daemon. You contact the rucio team and are told that a fix was already done in the pull request #5246 and will be released next week. Follow the following steps to create a patch file from this pull request without having to wait for the next rucio release to fix your issue:

Clone the main rucio repository:

git clone https://github.com/rucio/rucio.git
cd rucio
# Create a new branch from the 1.27.3 release tag
git checkout 1.27.3 -b patch-0-hotfix_conveyor_poller_on_1.27.3

The #5246 pull request was submitted by the user rcarpa from his rucio fork rcarpa/rucio. You'll have to add this fork repository as a git remote:

git remote add rcarpa https://github.com/rcarpa/rucio.git
git fetch rcarpa
# Cherry-pick the commit from the #5246 pull request.
# Beware, some PR can have multiple commits
git cherry-pick 47d36345469ac9c1391cacd09487d4ec6ced627f

Now you can create the patch with the differences between the rucio 1.27.3 release and the current state of the repository:

git diff 1.27.3 > hotfix_conveyor_poller.patch

Mounting a patch in a kubernetes cluster​

If you deploy rucio in a kubernetes cluster using the official rucio helm charts and want to hotfix rucio using a patch file created in the previous section, follow these steps:

Create a kubernetes secret from the hotfix patch:

kubectl -n rucio create secret generic hotfix-conveyor-poller-patch --from-file=hotfix_conveyor_poller.patch

Note: if you have more than one cluster, don't forget to create the secrets in each cluster to be patched.

Now you'll have to update the helm values file for each helm release and add the following

    secretMounts:
      - secretFullName: hotfix-conveyor-poller-patch
        mountPath: /patch/hotfix_conveyor_poller.patch
        subPath: hotfix_conveyor_poller.patch