Plesk Obsidian Auto-Updates – the Beginning of a Short Releases Era

Plesk Obsidian short releases

Starting from Plesk Obsidian (major version 18), Plesk is moving away from long periods of time between major releases. Hence, taking the continuous delivery approach. Just like your mobile phone gets periodic updates, your Plesk server will also receive Plesk Obsidian auto-updates each month.

On July 8, we enabled the automatic updates for our Partners and introduced additional functionalities in Partner Central. Thus allowing us to schedule updates for specific days of the week. You can get more info in our partner auto-updates article here.

Automatic updates for the previous Plesk version (Onyx) became available for Partners earlier this year. And this resulted in the highest last version adoption growth in Plesk so far. From July to September 2019, the number of servers running Onyx 17.8 increased by 13% after activating automatic updates.

Plesk Servers by Version Distribution

Plesk server distribution

Short Releases in Plesk Obsidian

From Plesk Obsidian onwards, the release tiers used before – Early adopters, General release and Later adopter release – become obsolete. Starting from major version 18, Plesk will ship monthly updates to your Plesk server(s). The only supported version will be the major version 18. So, we will support the last minor version and the version preceding Plesk Obsidian, including of course, the major version itself. For more details, please refer to the Plesk Lifecycle Policy.

Weekly updates with patches and bug fixes are also a thing of the past. Because everything including new Obsidian features will come directly through the regular monthly updates.

Plesk Obsidian Auto-updates: Why Are We Doing This?

There are three main reasons behind the Plesk Obsidian Auto-updates decision:

  1. Delivering new features to our Partners will be faster and more regular.
  2. We’re going for simplified alignment with Plesk extensions development.
  3. We don’t want our Partners to worry about staying on the latest version.
    Once a Partner opted for an auto-update, their servers will automatically get on the latest updated version.

Coming Soon: New Controls in Partner Central & Plesk

Currently, in Partner Central, Partners can select the weekdays when Plesk can install automatic updates. Soon we’ll be adding further customization settings for updates scheduling.

Anything More to Know? (Frequently Asked Questions)

A: Yes, you can. However, we don’t recommend it because this way you don’t get any security updates and your Plesk server is unprotected. Plesk doesn’t accept any security-related claims in case of disabled auto-updates.
A: In Partner Central, you can select your choice of weekdays for updates installation. Please check our partner auto-updates article here for more details.
A: Your server will automatically update to the latest available Obsidian release. Be careful: Plesk does not recommend this scenario, because as you will skip several releases, updating through several Plesk versions might result in issues due to untested scenarios.