Upgrade a Splunk SOAR (On-premises) instance

Follow these steps to upgrade your unprivileged instance, or to convert and upgrade your existing, privileged instance to an unprivileged instance. Use these steps even if your unprivileged instance has limited access to the internet. The installation TAR file contains everything needed to complete this upgrade.

The same TAR file is used for install and upgrade processes. The file detects the presence of SOAR and installs or upgrades accordingly.

If you have already downloaded and extracted the installer package to migrate your privileged instance to unprivileged, you can move straight to step 10 and run the install script.

1. Read upgrade overview and prerequisites.
2. Prepare your system for upgrade. See Prepare your Splunk SOAR (On-premises) deployment for upgrade.
3. Restart the operating system if you did not recently restart it as part of the preparations in Step 2.
   This step is required to ensure that the upgrade completes successfully and efficiently.
   As the root user:

   reboot

4. After the system restarts, log in to the operating system as the user that owns Splunk SOAR (On-premises). Do not perform the upgrade as the root user.
5. Download the unprivileged installer from the Splunk SOAR site. The unprivileged installer prepackages its dependencies and can be installed on systems that cannot reach out to the internet.
   The unprivileged installer is named in the format splunk_soar-unpriv-<major>.<minor>.<patch>.<build>-<commit_short_sha>-<os>-x86_64.tgz.
6. Conditional: If you have previously upgraded this instance of Splunk SOAR (On-premises), you may still have a directory at <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar. If that is true, remove that directory.

   rm -rf <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar

7. Extract the TAR file you downloaded into the Splunk SOAR (On-premises) installation directory.

   tar -xvf <installer>.tgz -C <$PHANTOM_HOME>

   Extracting the TAR file this way creates a new directory in the Splunk SOAR (On-premises) home directory, <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar.
8. Make sure that that your current installation of is running.

   <$PHANTOM_HOME>/bin/start_phantom.sh

9. Change directory to the <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar directory.

   cd <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar

10. With a text editor, update <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar/install/install_common.py.
    On or around line 208, modify the GLUSTER_RPM_SOURCE_BASE_URL_EL8 declaration. Change the word "mirror" in the URL to the word "vault."
    GLUSTER_RPM_SOURCE_BASE_URL_EL8 = ("https://vault.centos.org/centos/8-stream/storage/x86_64/gluster-9/Packages/")

    The mirror for GlusterFS packages has moved, changing the URL Splunk SOAR (On-premises) uses download those packages. You will need to update the file install_common.py before you can build or upgrade a clustered deployment, or use a GlusterFS external fileshare.

11. The installer package you extracted creates a file called soar-install in the <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar directory. Run that script.

    ./soar-install --upgrade --with-apps

    • Conditional: If you extracted the installation TAR file to a different directory than <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar, you must supply the path to your Splunk SOAR (On-premises) installation to the installation script.

      <path/to/extracted/TAR file>/soar-install --splunk-soar-home <path/to/$PHANTOM_HOME> --upgrade --with-apps

      You can see the full list of arguments for the soar-install script by using the --help option.

12. Verify that upgrade is complete by logging in to the 's web-based user interface.

    If your Splunk SOAR (On-premises) deployment uses an external PostgreSQL database, skip the following steps. When you upgrade to the 6.2.0 or higher release Splunk SOAR (On-premises)'s local PostgreSQL is upgraded from 11.19 to 15.3. Additional manual steps are required to make sure the local PostgreSQL database runs with the best performance. These steps may add significant time to your upgrade.

13. Remove the PostgreSQL 11 database from Splunk SOAR (On-premises). You may move them to longterm storage or delete them.

    rm -rf <$PHANTOM_HOME>/data/db.old

14. Optimize Splunk SOAR (On-premises)'s PostgresSQL 15 database so that it gives the best possible performance.
    1. Open a database management shell.

       phenv python -m manage dbshell 

    2. Run this pgsql query.

       VACUUM (VERBOSE, ANALYZE); 

    3. Once the query is complete, close the database management shell.

       \q

15. After your Splunk SOAR (On-premises) upgrade is complete, remove installation package by deleting the <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar directory.

    rm -rf <$PHANTOM_HOME>/splunk-soar