Upgrade to node 16 (gallium)

[larsyencken]

What

We are currently on Node 12.22.3 (erbium) which reaches end-of-life in April this year. We would like to update to 16.13.2 (gallium), both for speed and continued support, but also because it's blocking an upgrade to Webpack 5.

Steps

• Remove the fibers package
• Update .nvmrc to gallium
• Test that everything works locally
• Test that everything works on a staging server
• Solve outstanding problems
  • Admin server restart when special charts are updated
  • Wordpress's yarn runPostUpdateHook runs using the wrong Node version
• Probe the whole upgrade process
• Deploy to live
• Make sure the pm2 path given in /etc/systemd/system/pm2-owid.service is correct (see: Server setup: set up PM2 startup)

[marcelgerber]

Okay we're in a good state here now; all staging servers are now running on Node 16 and mostly fine.¹²

This here is the procedure we will have to run on live:

pm2 stop live live-deploy-queue

nvm install 16.13.2
nvm alias default 16
npm install -g yarn pm2
sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/pm2-owid.service # change 'v12.22.3' to 'v16.13.2'

# Install Node 16 through apt; this is what will be used by Wordpress when it runs `yarn runPostUpdateHook`
sudo apt remove nodejs
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

# Re-create pm2 entries so they use the correct PATH and run using Node 16
cd live
pm2 stop live live-deploy-queue
pm2 delete live live-deploy-queue
pm2 start --time --name live "yarn startAdminServer"
pm2 start --time --name live-deploy-queue "yarn startDeployQueueServer"
pm2 save

# Deploy with Node 16 changes merged

sudo reboot # see that everything still works
pm2 log live # check for errors
pm2 log live-deploy-queue # check for errors

Footnotes

1. One exception is that, for all servers that don't have 140a68e applied (currently all but tufte), the admin server will restart after a chart update for a chart that doesn't have country data. ↩

2. We can actually keep some (especially older) staging servers running on Node 12 and only update newer ones to Node 16, no problem. ↩

[marcelgerber]

All done, live and staging servers are all updated to Node 16.