Upgrade Dapr on a Kubernetes cluster

Prerequisites

• Dapr CLI
• Helm 3 (if using Helm)

Upgrade existing cluster to 1.2.0

There are two ways to upgrade the Dapr control plane on a Kubernetes cluster using either the Dapr CLI or Helm.

Dapr CLI

The example below shows how to upgrade to version 1.2.0:

dapr upgrade -k --runtime-version=1.2.0

You can provide all the available Helm chart configurations using the Dapr CLI. See here for more info.

Troubleshooting upgrade using the CLI

There is a known issue running upgrades on clusters that may have previously had a version prior to 1.0.0-rc.2 installed on a cluster.

Most users should not encounter this issue, but there are a few upgrade path edge cases that may leave an incompatible CustomResourceDefinition installed on your cluster. The error message for this case looks like this:

❌  Failed to upgrade Dapr: Warning: kubectl apply should be used on resource created by either kubectl create --save-config or kubectl apply
The CustomResourceDefinition "configurations.dapr.io" is invalid: spec.preserveUnknownFields: Invalid value: true: must be false in order to use defaults in the schema

To resolve this issue please run the follow command to upgrade the CustomResourceDefinition to a compatible version:

kubectl replace -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dapr/dapr/5a15b3e0f093d2d0938b12f144c7047474a290fe/charts/dapr/crds/configuration.yaml

Then proceed with the dapr upgrade --runtime-version 1.2.0 -k command as above.

Helm

From version 1.0.0 onwards, upgrading Dapr using Helm is no longer a disruptive action since existing certificate values will automatically be re-used.

1. Upgrade Dapr from 1.0.0 (or newer) to any [NEW VERSION] > v1.0.0:

   helm repo update
   

   helm upgrade dapr dapr/dapr --version [NEW VERSION] --namespace dapr-system --wait
   

   If you’re using a values file, remember to add the --values option when running the upgrade command.

2. Ensure all pods are running:

   kubectl get pods -n dapr-system -w
   
   NAME                                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   dapr-dashboard-69f5c5c867-mqhg4          1/1     Running   0          42s
   dapr-operator-5cdd6b7f9c-9sl7g           1/1     Running   0          41s
   dapr-placement-server-0                  1/1     Running   0          41s
   dapr-sentry-84565c747b-7bh8h             1/1     Running   0          35s
   dapr-sidecar-injector-68f868668f-6xnbt   1/1     Running   0          41s
   

3. Restart your application deployments to update the Dapr runtime:

   kubectl rollout restart deploy/<DEPLOYMENT-NAME>
   

4. All done!

Next steps

• Dapr on Kubernetes
• Dapr production guidelines