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Upgrade / downgrade

Make sure you stay on the lookout for any critical updates to Nimbus. The best way to do so is through the announcements channel on our discord. The release page can be found here.

Note

If your beacon node is already running, you'll need to restart it for the changes to take effect.

To update to the latest version, either download the binary or compile the beacon node release (see below), then restart the service.

Tip

To check which version of Nimbus you're currently running, run build/nimbus_beacon_node --version

Upgrade to the latest version

Open the Nimbus release page and download the file that corresponds to your operation system and machine.

Once downloaded, unpack the binaries in the same folder as your current version, overwriting the existing files.

wget <insert download link here>
tar -xzf nimbus-eth2_Linux_arm64v8*.tar.gz --strip-components 1 -C nimbus-eth2
rm nimbus-eth2_Linux_arm64v8*.tar.gz

Update Nimbus via the package manager as usual

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Upgrading Nimbus when built from source is similar to the installation process.

Run:

# Download the updated source code
git pull && make update

# Build the newly downloaded version
make -j4 nimbus_beacon_node

Tip

If you want to minimize downtime, you can build Nimbus while the node is running!

Complete the upgrade by restarting the node!

Urgency guidelines

Nimbus releases are marked with the following tags:

  • low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks
  • medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later
  • high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Install a specific version

Occasionally, you may need to either upgrade or downgrade to a specific version of Nimbus.

Nimbus can safely be downgraded to any version targeting the current hard fork of the chain, unless otherwise noted among the release notes.

Download the desired version from Github and replace the binaries, similar to upgrading.

Use the package manager to install a specific version:

sudo apt-get install nimbus-beacon-node=23.2.0

To pull a specific version of Nimbus (e.g. v22.9.1), run:

# Switch source code to the desired version
git checkout v22.9.1 && make update

# Run the build command as usual
make -j4 nimbus_beacon_node

When later you want to go back to the stable release:

# Switch source code to the stable version
git checkout stable && make update

# Run the build command as usual
make -j4 nimbus_beacon_node

Now, restart your node.