Version 1.5.6

New features

  • Support work with etcd cluster via set of proxies (Alexander Kukushkin)

    It might happen that etcd cluster is not accessible directly but via set of proxies. In this case Patroni will not perform etcd topology discovery but just round-robin via proxy hosts. Behavior is controlled by etcd.use_proxies .

  • Changed callbacks behavior when role on the node is changed (Alexander)

    If the role was changed from master or standby_leader to replica or from replica to standby_leader , on_restart callback will not be called anymore in favor of on_role_change callback.

  • Change the way how we start postgres (Alexander)

    Use multiprocessing.Process instead of executing itself and multiprocessing.Pipe to transmit the postmaster pid to the Patroni process. Before that we were using pipes, what was leaving postmaster process with stdin closed.

Bug fixes

  • Fix role returned by REST API for the standby leader (Alexander)

    It was incorrectly returning replica instead of standby_leader

  • Wait for callback end if it could not be killed (Julien Tachoires)

    Patroni doesn’t have enough privileges to terminate the callback script running under sudo what was cancelling the new callback. If the running script could not be killed, Patroni will wait until it finishes and then run the next callback.

  • Reduce lock time taken by dcs.get_cluster method (Alexander)

    Due to the lock being held DCS slowness was affecting the REST API health checks causing false positives.

  • Improve cleaning of PGDATA when pg_wal / pg_xlog is a symlink (Julien)

    In this case Patroni will explicitly remove files from the target directory.

  • Remove unnecessary usage of os.path.relpath (Ants Aasma)

    It depends on being able to resolve the working directory, what will fail if Patroni is started in a directory that is later unlinked from the filesystem.

  • Do not enforce ssl version when communicating with Etcd (Alexander)

    For some unknown reason python3-etcd on debian and ubuntu are not based on the latest version of the package and therefore it enforces TLSv1 which is not supported by Etcd v3. We solved this problem on Patroni side.

Version 1.5.5

This version introduces the possibility of automatic reinit of the former master, improves patronictl list output and fixes a number of bugs.

New features

  • Add support of PATRONI_ETCD_PROTOCOL , PATRONI_ETCD_USERNAME and PATRONI_ETCD_PASSWORD environment variables (Étienne M)

    Before it was possible to configure them only in the config file or as a part of PATRONI_ETCD_URL , which is not always convenient.

  • Make it possible to automatically reinit the former master (Alexander Kukushkin)

    If the pg_rewind is disabled or can’t be used, the former master could fail to start as a new replica due to diverged timelines. In this case, the only way to fix it is wiping the data directory and reinitializing. This behavior could be changed by setting postgresql.remove_data_directory_on_diverged_timelines . When it is set, Patroni will wipe the data directory and reinitialize the former master automatically.

  • Show information about timelines in patronictl list (Alexander)

    It helps to detect stale replicas. In addition to that, Host will include ‘:{port}’ if the port value isn’t default or there is more than one member running on the same host.

  • Create a headless service associated with the $SCOPE-config endpoint (Alexander)

    The "config" endpoint keeps information about the cluster-wide Patroni and Postgres configuration, history file, and last but the most important, it holds the initialize key. When the Kubernetes master node is restarted or upgraded, it removes endpoints without services. The headless service will prevent it from being removed.

Bug fixes

  • Adjust the read timeout for the leader watch blocking query (Alexander)

    According to the Consul documentation, the actual response timeout is increased by a small random amount of additional wait time added to the supplied maximum wait time to spread out the wake up time of any concurrent requests. It adds up to wait / 16 additional time to the maximum duration. In our case we are adding wait / 15 or 1 second depending on what is bigger.

  • Always use replication=1 when connecting via replication protocol to the postgres (Alexander)

    Starting from Postgres 10 the line in the pg_hba.conf with database=replication doesn’t accept connections with the parameter replication=database.

  • Don’t write primary_conninfo into recovery.conf for wal-only standby cluster (Alexander)

    Despite not having neither host nor port defined in the standby_cluster config, Patroni was putting the primary_conninfo into the recovery.conf , which is useless and generating a lot of errors.

Version 1.5.4

This version implements flexible logging and fixes a number of bugs.

New features

  • Improvements in logging infrastructure (Alexander Kukushkin, Lucas Capistrant, Alexander Anikin)

    Logging configuration could be configured not only from environment variables but also from Patroni config file. It makes it possible to change logging configuration in runtime by updating config and doing reload or sending SIGHUP to the Patroni process. By default Patroni writes logs to stderr, but now it becomes possible to write logs directly into the file and rotate when it reaches a certain size. In addition to that added support of custom dateformat and the possibility to fine-tune log level for each python module.

  • Make it possible to take into account the current timeline during leader elections (Alexander Kukushkin)

    It could happen that the node is considering itself as a healthiest one although it is currently not on the latest known timeline. In some cases we want to avoid promoting of such node, which could be achieved by setting check_timeline parameter to true (default behavior remains unchanged).

  • Relaxed requirements on superuser credentials

    Libpq allows opening connections without explicitly specifying neither username nor password. Depending on situation it relies either on pgpass file or trust authentication method in pg_hba.conf. Since pg_rewind is also using libpq, it will work the same way.

  • Implemented possibility to configure Consul Service registration and check interval via environment variables (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Registration of service in Consul was added in the 1.5.0, but so far it was only possible to turn it on via patroni.yaml.

Stability Improvements

  • Set archive_mode to off during the custom bootstrap (Alexander Kukushkin)

    We want to avoid archiving wals and history files until the cluster is fully functional. It really helps if the custom bootstrap involves pg_upgrade.

  • Apply five seconds backoff when loading global config on start (Alexander Kukushkin)

    It helps to avoid hammering DCS when Patroni just starting up.

  • Reduce amount of error messages generated on shutdown (Alexander Kukushkin)

    They were harmless but rather annoying and sometimes scary.

  • Explicitly secure rw perms for recovery.conf at creation time (Lucas)

    We don’t want anybody except patroni/postgres user reading this file, because it contains replication user and password.

  • Redirect HTTPServer exceptions to logger (Julien Riou)

    By default, such exceptions were logged on standard output messing with regular logs.

Bug fixes

  • Removed stderr pipe to stdout on pg_ctl process (Cody Coons)

    Inheriting stderr from the main Patroni process allows all Postgres logs to be seen along with all patroni logs. This is very useful in a container environment as Patroni and Postgres logs may be consumed using standard tools (docker logs, kubectl, etc). In addition to that, this change fixes a bug with Patroni not being able to catch postmaster pid when postgres writing some warnings into stderr.

  • Set Consul service check deregister timeout in Go time format (Pavel Kirillov)

    Without explicitly mentioned time unit registration was failing.

  • Relax checks of standby_cluster cluster configuration (Dmitry Dolgov, Alexander Kukushkin)

    It was accepting only strings as valid values and therefore it was not possible to specify the port as integer and create_replica_methods as a list.

Version 1.5.3

Compatibility and bugfix release.

  • Improve stability when running with python3 against zookeeper (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Change of loop_wait was causing Patroni to disconnect from zookeeper and never reconnect back.

  • Fix broken compatibility with postgres 9.3 (Alexander)

    When opening a replication connection we should specify replication=1, beacuse 9.3 does not understand replication=’database’

  • Make sure we refresh Consul session at least once per HA loop and improve handling of consul sessions exceptions (Alexander)

    Restart of local consul agent invalidates all sessions related to the node. Not calling session refresh on time and not doing proper handling of session errors was causing demote of the primary.

Version 1.5.2

Compatibility and bugfix release.

  • Compatibility with kazoo-2.6.0 (Alexander Kukushkin)

    In order to make sure that requests are performed with an appropriate timeout, Patroni redefines create_connection method from python-kazoo module. The last release of kazoo slightly changed the way how create_connection method is called.

  • Fix Patroni crash when Consul cluster loses the leader (Alexander)

    The crash was happening due to incorrect implementation of touch_member method, it should return boolean and not raise any exceptions.

Version 1.5.1

This version implements support of permanent replication slots, adds support of pgBackRest and fixes number of bugs.

New features

  • Permanent replication slots (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Permanent replication slots are preserved on failover/switchover, that is, Patroni on the new primary will create configured replication slots right after doing promote. Slots could be configured with the help of patronictl edit-config . The initial configuration could be also done in the bootstrap.dcs .

  • Add pgbackrest support (Yogesh Sharma)

    pgBackrest can restore in existing $PGDATA folder, this allows speedy restore as files which have not changed since last backup are skipped, to support this feature new parameter keep_data has been introduced. See replica creation method section for additional examples.

Bug fixes

Version 1.5.0

This version enables Patroni HA cluster to operate in a standby mode, introduces experimental support for running on Windows, and provides a new configuration parameter to register PostgreSQL service in Consul.

New features

  • Standby cluster (Dmitry Dolgov)

    One or more Patroni nodes can form a standby cluster that runs alongside the primary one (i.e. in another datacenter) and consists of standby nodes that replicate from the master in the primary cluster. All PostgreSQL nodes in the standby cluster are replicas; one of those replicas elects itself to replicate directly from the remote master, while the others replicate from it in a cascading manner. More detailed description of this feature and some configuration examples can be found at here .

  • Register Services in Consul (Pavel Kirillov, Alexander Kukushkin)

    If register_service parameter in the consul configuration is enabled, the node will register a service with the name scope and the tag master , replica or standby-leader .

  • Experimental Windows support (Pavel Golub)

    From now on it is possible to run Patroni on Windows, although Windows support is brand-new and hasn’t received as much real-world testing as its Linux counterpart. We welcome your feedback!

Improvements in patronictl

  • Add patronictl -k/–insecure flag and support for restapi cert (Wilfried Roset)

    In the past if the REST API was protected by the self-signed certificates patronictl would fail to verify them. There was no way to disable that verification. It is now possible to configure patronictl to skip the certificate verification altogether or provide CA and client certificates in the ctl: section of configuration.

  • Exclude members with nofailover tag from patronictl switchover/failover output (Alexander Anikin)

    Previously, those members were incorrectly proposed as candidates when performing interactive switchover or failover via patronictl.

Stability improvements

  • Avoid parsing non-key-value output lines of pg_controldata (Alexander Anikin)

    Under certain circuimstances pg_controldata outputs lines without a colon character. That would trigger an error in Patroni code that parsed pg_controldata output, hiding the actual problem; often such lines are emitted in a warning shown by pg_controldata before the regular output, i.e. when the binary major version does not match the one of the PostgreSQL data directory.

  • Add member name to the error message during the leader election (Jan Mussler)

    During the leader election, Patroni connects to all known members of the cluster and requests their status. Such status is written to the Patroni log and includes the name of the member. Previously, if the member was not accessible, the error message did not indicate its name, containing only the URL.

  • Immediately reserve the WAL position upon creation of the replication slot (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Starting from 9.6, pg_create_physical_replication_slot function provides an additional boolean parameter immediately_reserve . When it is set to false , which is also the default, the slot doesn’t reserve the WAL position until it receives the first client connection, potentially losing some segments required by the client in a time window between the slot creation and the intiial client connection.

  • Fix bug in strict synchronous replication (Alexander Kukushkin)

    When running with synchronous_mode_strict: true , in some cases Patroni puts * into the synchronous_standby_names , changing the sync state for most of the replication connections to potential . Previously, Patroni couldn’t pick a synchronous candidate under such curcuimstances, as it only considered those with the state async .

Version 1.4.6

Bug fixes and stability improvements

This release fixes a critical issue with Patroni API /master endpoint returning 200 for the non-master node. This is a reporting issue, no actual split-brain, but under certain circumstances clients might be directed to the read-only node.

  • Reset is_leader status on demote (Alexander Kukushkin, Oleksii Kliukin)

    Make sure demoted cluster member stops responding with code 200 on the /master API call.

  • Add new "cluster_unlocked" field to the API output (Dmitry Dolgov)

    This field indicates whether the cluster has the master running. It can be used when it is not possible to query any other node but one of the replicas.

Version 1.4.5

New features

  • Improve logging when applying new postgres configuration (Don Seiler)

    Patroni logs changed parameter names and values.

  • Python 3.7 compatibility (Christoph Berg)

    async is a reserved keyword in python3.7

  • Set state to "stopped" in the DCS when a member is shut down (Tony Sorrentino)

    This shows the member state as "stopped" in "patronictl list" command.

  • Improve the message logged when stale postmaster.pid matches a running process (Ants Aasma)

    The previous one was beyond confusing.

  • Implement patronictl reload functionality (Don Seiler)

    Before that it was only possible to reload configuration by either calling REST API or by sending SIGHUP signal to the Patroni process.

  • Take and apply some parameters from controldata when starting as a replica (Alexander Kukushkin)

    The value of max_connections and some other parameters set in the global configuration may be lower than the one actually used by the primary; when this happens, the replica cannot start and should be fixed manually. Patroni takes care of that now by reading and applying the value from pg_controldata , starting postgres and setting pending_restart flag.

  • If set, use LD_LIBRARY_PATH when starting postgres (Chris Fraser)

    When starting up Postgres, Patroni was passing along PATH, LC_ALL and LANG env vars if they are set. Now it is doing the same with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It should help if somebody installed PostgreSQL to non-standard place.

  • Rename create_replica_method to create_replica_methods (Dmitry Dolgov)

    To make it clear that it’s actually an array. The old name is still supported for backward compatibility.

Bug fixes and stability improvements

  • Fix condition for the replica start due to pg_rewind in paused state (Oleksii Kliukin)

    Avoid starting the replica that had already executed pg_rewind before.

  • Respond 200 to the master health-check only if update_lock has been successful (Alexander)

    Prevent Patroni from reporting itself a master on the former (demoted) master if DCS is partitioned.

  • Fix compatibility with the new consul module (Alexander)

    Starting from v1.1.0 python-consul changed internal API and started using list instead of dict to pass query parameters.

  • Catch exceptions from Patroni REST API thread during shutdown (Alexander)

    Those uncaught exceptions kept PostgreSQL running at shutdown.

  • Do crash recovery only when Postgres runs as the master (Alexander)

    Require pg_controldata to report ‘in production’ or ‘shutting down’ or ‘in crash recovery’. In all other cases no crash recovery is necessary.

  • Improve handling of configuration errors (Henning Jacobs, Alexander)

    It is possible to change a lot of parameters in runtime (including restapi.listen ) by updating Patroni config file and sending SIGHUP to Patroni process. This fix eliminates obscure exceptions from the ‘restapi’ thread when some of the parameters receive invalid values.

Version 1.4.4

Stability improvements

  • Fix race condition in poll_failover_result (Alexander Kukushkin)

    It didn’t affect directly neither failover nor switchover, but in some rare cases it was reporting success too early, when the former leader released the lock, producing a ‘Failed over to "None"’ instead of ‘Failed over to "desired-node"’ message.

  • Treat Postgres parameter names as case insensitive (Alexander)

    Most of the Postgres parameters have snake_case names, but there are three exceptions from this rule: DateStyle, IntervalStyle and TimeZone. Postgres accepts those parameters when written in a different case (e.g. timezone = ‘some/tzn’); however, Patroni was unable to find case-insensitive matches of those parameter names in pg_settings and ignored such parameters as a result.

  • Abort start if attaching to running postgres and cluster not initialized (Alexander)

    Patroni can attach itself to an already running Postgres instance. It is imperative to start running Patroni on the master node before getting to the replicas.

  • Fix behavior of patronictl scaffold (Alexander)

    Pass dict object to touch_member instead of json encoded string, DCS implementation will take care of encoding it.

  • Don’t demote master if failed to update leader key in pause (Alexander)

    During maintenance a DCS may start failing write requests while continuing to responds to read ones. In that case, Patroni used to put the Postgres master node to a read-only mode after failing to update the leader lock in DCS.

  • Sync replication slots when Patroni notices a new postmaster process (Alexander)

    If Postgres has been restarted, Patroni has to make sure that list of replication slots matches its expectations.

  • Verify sysid and sync replication slots after coming out of pause (Alexander)

    During the maintenance mode it may happen that data directory was completely rewritten and therefore we have to make sure that Database system identifier still belongs to our cluster and replication slots are in sync with Patroni expectations.

  • Fix a possible failure to start not running Postgres on a data directory with postmaster lock file present (Alexander)

    Detect reuse of PID from the postmaster lock file. More likely to hit such problem if you run Patroni and Postgres in the docker container.

  • Improve protection of DCS being accidentally wiped (Alexander)

    Patroni has a lot of logic in place to prevent failover in such case; it can also restore all keys back; however, until this change an accidental removal of /config key was switching off pause mode for 1 cycle of HA loop.

  • Do not exit when encountering invalid system ID (Oleksii Kliukin)

    Do not exit when the cluster system ID is empty or the one that doesn’t pass the validation check. In that case, the cluster most likely needs a reinit; mention it in the result message. Avoid terminating Patroni, as otherwise reinit cannot happen.

Compatibility with Kubernetes 1.10+

  • Added check for empty subsets (Cody Coons)

    Kubernetes 1.10.0+ started returning Endpoints.subsets set to None instead of [] .

Bootstrap improvements

  • Make deleting recovery.conf optional (Brad Nicholson)

    If bootstrap..keep_existing_recovery_conf is defined and set to True , Patroni will not remove the existing recovery.conf file. This is useful when bootstrapping from a backup with tools like pgBackRest that generate the appropriate recovery.conf for you.

  • Allow options to the basebackup built-in method (Oleksii)

    It is now possible to supply options to the built-in basebackup method by defining the basebackup section in the configuration, similar to how those are defined for custom replica creation methods. The difference is in the format accepted by the basebackup section: since pg_basebackup accepts both –key=value and –key options, the contents of the section could be either a dictionary of key-value pairs, or a list of either one-element dictionaries or just keys (for the options that don’t accept values). See replica creation method section for additional examples.

Version 1.4.3

Improvements in logging

  • Make log level configurable from environment variables (Andy Newton, Keyvan Hedayati)

    PATRONI_LOGLEVEL - sets the general logging level PATRONI_REQUESTS_LOGLEVEL - sets the logging level for all HTTP requests e.g. Kubernetes API calls See the docs for Python logging to get the names of possible log levels

Stability improvements and bug fixes

  • Don’t rediscover etcd cluster topology when watch timed out (Alexander Kukushkin)

    If we have only one host in etcd configuration and exactly this host is not accessible, Patroni was starting discovery of cluster topology and never succeeding. Instead it should just switch to the next available node.

  • Write content of bootstrap.pg_hba into a pg_hba.conf after custom bootstrap (Alexander)

    Now it behaves similarly to the usual bootstrap with initdb

  • Single user mode was waiting for user input and never finish (Alexander)

    Regression was introduced in https://github.com/zalando/patroni/pull/576

Version 1.4.2

Improvements in patronictl

  • Rename scheduled failover to scheduled switchover (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Failover and switchover functions were separated in version 1.4, but patronictl list was still reporting Scheduled failover instead of Scheduled switchover .

  • Show information about pending restarts (Alexander)

    In order to apply some configuration changes sometimes it is necessary to restart postgres. Patroni was already giving a hint about that in the REST API and when writing node status into DCS, but there were no easy way to display it.

  • Make show-config to work with cluster_name from config file (Alexander)

    It works similar to the patronictl edit-config

Stability improvements

  • Avoid calling pg_controldata during bootstrap (Alexander)

    During initdb or custom bootstrap there is a time window when pgdata is not empty but pg_controldata has not been written yet. In such case pg_controldata call was failing with error messages.

  • Handle exceptions raised from psutil (Alexander)

    cmdline is read and parsed every time when cmdline() method is called. It could happen that the process being examined has already disappeared, in that case NoSuchProcess is raised.

Kubernetes support improvements

  • Don’t swallow errors from k8s API (Alexander)

    A call to Kubernetes API could fail for a different number of reasons. In some cases such call should be retried, in some other cases we should log the error message and the exception stack trace. The change here will help debug Kubernetes permission issues.

  • Update Kubernetes example Dockerfile to install Patroni from the master branch (Maciej Szulik)

    Before that it was using feature/k8s , which became outdated.

  • Add proper RBAC to run patroni on k8s (Maciej)

    Add the Service account that is assigned to the pods of the cluster, the role that holds only the necessary permissions, and the rolebinding that connects the Service account and the Role.

Version 1.4.1

Fixes in patronictl

  • Don’t show current leader in suggested list of members to failover to. (Alexander Kukushkin)

    patronictl failover could still work when there is leader in the cluster and it should be excluded from the list of member where it is possible to failover to.

  • Make patronictl switchover compatible with the old Patroni api (Alexander)

    In case if POST /switchover REST API call has failed with status code 501 it will do it once again, but to /failover endpoint.

Version 1.4

This version adds support for using Kubernetes as a DCS, allowing to run Patroni as a cloud-native agent in Kubernetes without any additional deployments of Etcd, Zookeeper or Consul.

Upgrade notice

Installing Patroni via pip will no longer bring in dependencies for (such as libraries for Etcd, Zookeper, Consul or Kubernetes, or support for AWS). In order to enable them one need to list them in pip install command explicitely, for instance pip install patroni[etcd,kubernetes] .

Kubernetes support

Implement Kubernetes-based DCS. The endpoints meta-data is used in order to store the configuration and the leader key. The meta-data field inside the pods definition is used to store the member-related data. In addition to using Endpoints, Patroni supports ConfigMaps. You can find more information about this feature in the Kubernetes chapter of the documentation

Stability improvements

  • Factor out postmaster process into a separate object (Ants Aasma)

    This object identifies a running postmaster process via pid and start time and simplifies detection (and resolution) of situations when the postmaster was restarted behind our back or when postgres directory disappeared from the file system.

  • Minimize the amount of SELECT’s issued by Patroni on every loop of HA cylce (Alexander Kukushkin)

    On every iteration of HA loop Patroni needs to know recovery status and absolute wal position. From now on Patroni will run only single SELECT to get this information instead of two on the replica and three on the master.

  • Remove leader key on shutdown only when we have the lock (Ants)

    Unconditional removal was generating unnecessary and missleading exceptions.

Improvements in patronictl

  • Add version command to patronictl (Ants)

    It will show the version of installed Patroni and versions of running Patroni instances (if the cluster name is specified).

  • Make optional specifying cluster_name argument for some of patronictl commands (Alexander, Ants)

    It will work if patronictl is using usual Patroni configuration file with the scope defined.

  • Show information about scheduled switchover and maintenance mode (Alexander)

    Before that it was possible to get this information only from Patroni logs or directly from DCS.

  • Improve patronictl reinit (Alexander)

    Sometimes patronictl reinit refused to proceed when Patroni was busy with other actions, namely trying to start postgres. patronictl didn’t provide any commands to cancel such long running actions and the only (dangerous) workarond was removing a data directory manually. The new implementation of reinit forcefully cancells other long-running actions before proceeding with reinit.

  • Implement --wait flag in patronictl pause and patronictl resume (Alexander)

    It will make patronictl wait until the requested action is acknowledged by all nodes in the cluster. Such behaviour is achieved by exposing the pause flag for every node in DCS and via the REST API.

  • Rename patronictl failover into patronictl switchover (Alexander)

    The previous failover was actually only capable of doing a switchover; it refused to proceed in a cluster without the leader.

  • Alter the behavior of patronictl failover (Alexander)

    It will work even if there is no leader, but in that case you will have to explicitely specify a node which should become the new leader.

Expose information about timeline and history

  • Expose current timeline in DCS and via API (Alexander)

    Store information about the current timeline for each member of the cluster. This information is accessible via the API and is stored in the DCS

  • Store promotion history in the /history key in DCS (Alexander)

    In addition, store the timeline history enriched with the timestamp of the corresponding promotion in the /history key in DCS and update it with each promote.

Add endpoints for getting synchronous and asynchronous replicas

  • Add new /sync and /async endpoints (Alexander, Oleksii Kliukin)
Those endpoints (also accessible as /synchronous and /asynchronous) return 200 only for synchronous and asynchornous replicas correspondingly (exclusing those marked as noloadbalance ).

Allow multiple hosts for Etcd

  • Add a new hosts parameter to Etcd configuration (Alexander)

    This parameter should contain the initial list of hosts that will be used to discover and populate the list of the running etcd cluster members. If for some reason during work this list of discovered hosts is exhausted (no available hosts from that list), Patroni will return to the initial list from the hosts parameter.

Version 1.3.6

Stability improvements

  • Verify process start time when checking if postgres is running. (Ants Aasma)

    After a crash that doesn’t clean up postmaster.pid there could be a new process with the same pid, resulting in a false positive for is_running(), which will lead to all kinds of bad behavior.

  • Shutdown postgresql before bootstrap when we lost data directory (ainlolcat)

    When data directory on the master is forcefully removed, postgres process can still stay alive for some time and prevent the replica created in place of that former master from starting or replicating. The fix makes Patroni cache the postmaster pid and its start time and let it terminate the old postmaster in case it is still running after the corresponding data directory has been removed.

  • Perform crash recovery in a single user mode if postgres master dies (Alexander Kukushkin)

    It is unsafe to start immediately as a standby and not possible to run pg_rewind if postgres hasn’t been shut down cleanly. The single user crash recovery only kicks in if pg_rewind is enabled or there is no master at the moment.

Consul improvements

  • Make it possible to provide datacenter configuration for Consul (Vilius Okockis, Alexander)

    Before that Patroni was always communicating with datacenter of the host it runs on.

  • Always send a token in X-Consul-Token http header (Alexander)

    If consul.token is defined in Patroni configuration, we will always send it in the ‘X-Consul-Token’ http header. python-consul module tries to be "consistent" with Consul REST API, which doesn’t accept token as a query parameter for session API , but it still works with ‘X-Consul-Token’ header.

  • Adjust session TTL if supplied value is smaller than the minimum possible (Stas Fomin, Alexander)

    It could happen that the TTL provided in the Patroni configuration is smaller than the minimum one supported by Consul. In that case, Consul agent fails to create a new session. Without a session Patroni cannot create member and leader keys in the Consul KV store, resulting in an unhealthy cluster.

Other improvements

  • Define custom log format via environment variable PATRONI_LOGFORMAT (Stas)

    Allow disabling timestamps and other similar fields in Patroni logs if they are already added by the system logger (usually when Patroni runs as a service).

Version 1.3.5

Bugfix

  • Set role to ‘uninitialized’ if data directory was removed (Alexander Kukushkin)

    If the node was running as a master it was preventing from failover.

Stability improvement

  • Try to run postmaster in a single-user mode if we tried and failed to start postgres (Alexander)

    Usually such problem happens when node running as a master was terminated and timelines were diverged. If recovery.conf has restore_command defined, there are really high chances that postgres will abort startup and leave controldata unchanged. It makes impossible to use pg_rewind , which requires a clean shutdown.

Consul improvements

  • Make it possible to specify health checks when creating session (Alexander)

    If not specified, Consul will use "serfHealth". From one side it allows fast detection of isolated master, but from another side it makes it impossible for Patroni to tolerate short network lags.

Bugfix

  • Fix watchdog on Python 3 (Ants Aasma)

    A misunderstanding of the ioctl() call interface. If mutable=False then fcntl.ioctl() actually returns the arg buffer back. This accidentally worked on Python2 because int and str comparison did not return an error. Error reporting is actually done by raising IOError on Python2 and OSError on Python3.

Version 1.3.4

Different Consul improvements

  • Pass the consul token as a header (Andrew Colin Kissa)

    Headers are now the prefered way to pass the token to the consul API .

  • Advanced configuration for Consul (Alexander Kukushkin)

    possibility to specify scheme , token , client and ca certificates details .

  • compatibility with python-consul-0.7.1 and above (Alexander)

    new python-consul module has changed signature of some methods

  • "Could not take out TTL lock" message was never logged (Alexander)

    Not a critical bug, but lack of proper logging complicates investigation in case of problems.

Quote synchronous_standby_names using quote_ident

  • When writing synchronous_standby_names into the postgresql.conf its value must be quoted (Alexander)

    If it is not quoted properly, PostgreSQL will effectively disable synchronous replication and continue to work.

Different bugfixes around pause state, mostly related to watchdog (Alexander)

  • Do not send keepalives if watchdog is not active
  • Avoid activating watchdog in a pause mode
  • Set correct postgres state in pause mode
  • Do not try to run queries from API if postgres is stopped

Version 1.3.3

Bugfixes

  • synchronous replication was disabled shortly after promotion even when synchronous_mode_strict was turned on (Alexander Kukushkin)
  • create empty pg_ident.conf file if it is missing after restoring from the backup (Alexander)
  • open access in pg_hba.conf to all databases, not only postgres (Franco Bellagamba)

Version 1.3.2

Bugfix

  • patronictl edit-config didn’t work with ZooKeeper (Alexander Kukushkin)

Version 1.3.1

Bugfix

  • failover via API was broken due to change in _MemberStatus (Alexander Kukushkin)

Version 1.3

Version 1.3 adds custom bootstrap possibility, significantly improves support for pg_rewind, enhances the synchronous mode support, adds configuration editing to patronictl and implements watchdog support on Linux. In addition, this is the first version to work correctly with PostgreSQL 10.

Upgrade notice

There are no known compatibility issues with the new version of Patroni. Configuration from version 1.2 should work without any changes. It is possible to upgrade by installing new packages and either restarting Patroni (will cause PostgreSQL restart), or by putting Patroni into a pause mode first and then restarting Patroni on all nodes in the cluster (Patroni in a pause mode will not attempt to stop/start PostgreSQL), resuming from the pause mode at the end.

Custom bootstrap

  • Make the process of bootstrapping the cluster configurable (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Allow custom bootstrap scripts instead of initdb when initializing the very first node in the cluster. The bootstrap command receives the name of the cluster and the path to the data directory. The resulting cluster can be configured to perform recovery, making it possible to bootstrap from a backup and do point in time recovery. Refer to the documentaton page for more detailed description of this feature.

Smarter pg_rewind support

  • Decide on whether to run pg_rewind by looking at the timeline differences from the current master (Alexander)

    Previously, Patroni had a fixed set of conditions to trigger pg_rewind, namely when starting a former master, when doing a switchover to the designated node for every other node in the cluster or when there is a replica with the nofailover tag. All those cases have in common a chance that some replica may be ahead of the new master. In some cases, pg_rewind did nothing, in some other ones it was not running when necessary. Instead of relying on this limited list of rules make Patroni compare the master and the replica WAL positions (using the streaming replication protocol) in order to reliably decide if rewind is necessary for the replica.

Synchronous replication mode strict

  • Enhance synchronous replication support by adding the strict mode (James Sewell, Alexander)

    Normally, when synchronous_mode is enabled and there are no replicas attached to the master, Patroni will disable synchronous replication in order to keep the master available for writes. The synchronous_mode_strict option changes that, when it is set Patroni will not disable the synchronous replication in a lack of replicas, effectively blocking all clients writing data to the master. In addition to the synchronous mode guarantee of preventing any data loss due to automatic failover, the strict mode ensures that each write is either durably stored on two nodes or not happening altogether if there is only one node in the cluster.

Configuration editing with patronictl

  • Add configuration editing to patronictl (Ants Aasma, Alexander)

    Add the ability to patronictl of editing dynamic cluster configuration stored in DCS. Support either specifying the parameter/values from the command-line, invoking the $EDITOR, or applying configuration from the yaml file.

Linux watchdog support

  • Implement watchdog support for Linux (Ants)

    Support Linux software watchdog in order to reboot the node where Patroni is not running or not responding (e.g because of the high load) The Linux software watchdog reboots the non-responsive node. It is possible to configure the watchdog device to use ( /dev/watchdog by default) and the mode (on, automatic, off) from the watchdog section of the Patroni configuration. You can get more information from the watchdog documentation .

Add support for PostgreSQL 10

  • Patroni is compatible with all beta versions of PostgreSQL 10 released so far and we expect it to be compatible with the PostgreSQL 10 when it will be released.

PostgreSQL-related minor improvements

  • Define pg_hba.conf via the Patroni configuration file or the dynamic configuration in DCS (Alexander)

    Allow to define the contents of pg_hba.conf in the pg_hba sub-section of the postgresql section of the configuration. This simplifies managing pg_hba.conf on multiple nodes, as one needs to define it only ones in DCS instead of logging to every node, changing it manually and reload the configuration.

    When defined, the contents of this section will replace the current pg_hba.conf completely. Patroni ignores it if hba_file PostgreSQL parameter is set.

  • Support connecting via a UNIX socket to the local PostgreSQL cluster (Alexander)

    Add the use_unix_socket option to the postgresql section of Patroni configuration. When set to true and the PostgreSQL unix_socket_directories option is not empty, enables Patroni to use the first value from it to connect to the local PostgreSQL cluster. If unix_socket_directories is not defined, Patroni will assume its default value and omit the host parameter in the PostgreSQL connection string altogether.

  • Support change of superuser and replication credentials on reload (Alexander)

  • Support storing of configuration files outside of PostgreSQL data directory (@jouir)

    Add the new configuration postgresql configuration directive config_dir . It defaults to the data directory and must be writable by Patroni.

Bug fixes and stability improvements

  • Handle EtcdEventIndexCleared and EtcdWatcherCleared exceptions (Alexander)

    Faster recovery when the watch operation is ended by Etcd by avoiding useless retries.

  • Remove error spinning on Etcd failure and reduce log spam (Ants)

    Avoid immediate retrying and emitting stack traces in the log on the second and subsequent Etcd connection failures.

  • Export locale variables when forking PostgreSQL processes (Oleksii Kliukin)

    Avoid the postmaster became multithreaded during startup fatal error on non-English locales for PostgreSQL built with NLS.

  • Extra checks when dropping the replication slot (Alexander)

    In some cases Patroni is prevented from dropping the replication slot by the WAL sender.

  • Truncate the replication slot name to 63 (NAMEDATALEN - 1) characters to comply with PostgreSQL naming rules (Nick Scott)

  • Fix a race condition resulting in extra connections being opened to the PostgreSQL cluster from Patroni (Alexander)

  • Release the leader key when the node restarts with an empty data directory (Alex Kerney)

  • Set asynchronous executor busy when running bootstrap without a leader (Alexander)

    Failure to do so could have resulted in errors stating the node belonged to a different cluster, as Patroni proceeded with the normal business while being bootstrapped by a bootstrap method that doesn’t require a leader to be present in the cluster.

  • Improve WAL-E replica creation method (Joar Wandborg, Alexander).

    • Use csv.DictReader when parsing WAL-E base backup, accepting ISO dates with space-delimited date and time.
    • Support fetching current WAL position from the replica to estimate the amount of WAL to restore. Previously, the code used to call system information functions that were available only on the master node.

Version 1.2

This version introduces significant improvements over the handling of synchronous replication, makes the startup process and failover more reliable, adds PostgreSQL 9.6 support and fixes plenty of bugs. In addition, the documentation, including these release notes, has been moved to https://patroni.readthedocs.io .

Synchronous replication

  • Add synchronous replication support. (Ants Aasma)

    Adds a new configuration variable synchronous_mode . When enabled, Patroni will manage synchronous_standby_names to enable synchronous replication whenever there are healthy standbys available. When synchronous mode is enabled, Patroni will automatically fail over only to a standby that was synchronously replicating at the time of the master failure. This effectively means that no user visible transaction gets lost in such a case. See the feature documentation for the detailed description and implementation details.

Reliability improvements

  • Do not try to update the leader position stored in the leader optime key when PostgreSQL is not 100% healthy. Demote immediately when the update of the leader key failed. (Alexander Kukushkin)

  • Exclude unhealthy nodes from the list of targets to clone the new replica from. (Alexander)

  • Implement retry and timeout strategy for Consul similar to how it is done for Etcd. (Alexander)

  • Make --dcs and --config-file apply to all options in patronictl . (Alexander)

  • Write all postgres parameters into postgresql.conf. (Alexander)

    It allows starting PostgreSQL configured by Patroni with just pg_ctl .

  • Avoid exceptions when there are no users in the config. (Kirill Pushkin)

  • Allow pausing an unhealthy cluster. Before this fix, patronictl would bail out if the node it tries to execute pause on is unhealthy. (Alexander)

  • Improve the leader watch functionality. (Alexander)

    Previously the replicas were always watching the leader key (sleeping until the timeout or the leader key changes). With this change, they only watch when the replica’s PostgreSQL is in the running state and not when it is stopped/starting or restarting PostgreSQL.

  • Avoid running into race conditions when handling SIGCHILD as a PID 1. (Alexander)

    Previously a race condition could occur when running inside the Docker containers, since the same process inside Patroni both spawned new processes and handled SIGCHILD from them. This change uses fork/execs for Patroni and leaves the original PID 1 process responsible for handling signals from children.

  • Fix WAL-E restore. (Oleksii Kliukin)

    Previously WAL-E restore used the no_master flag to avoid consulting with the master altogether, making Patroni always choose restoring from WAL over the pg_basebackup . This change reverts it to the original meaning of no_master , namely Patroni WAL-E restore may be selected as a replication method if the master is not running. The latter is checked by examining the connection string passed to the method. In addition, it makes the retry mechanism more robust and handles other minutia.

  • Implement asynchronous DNS resolver cache. (Alexander)

    Avoid failing when DNS is temporary unavailable (for instance, due to an excessive traffic received by the node).

  • Implement starting state and master start timeout. (Ants, Alexander)

    Previously pg_ctl waited for a timeout and then happily trodded on considering PostgreSQL to be running. This caused PostgreSQL to show up in listings as running when it was actually not and caused a race condition that resulted in either a failover, or a crash recovery, or a crash recovery interrupted by failover and a missed rewind. This change adds a master_start_timeout parameter and introduces a new state for the main HA loop: starting . When master_start_timeout is 0 we will failover immediately when the master crashes as soon as there is a failover candidate. Otherwise, Patroni will wait after attempting to start PostgreSQL on the master for the duration of the timeout; when it expires, it will failover if possible. Manual failover requests will be honored during the crash of the master even before the timeout expiration.

    Introduce the timeout parameter to the restart API endpoint and patronictl . When it is set and restart takes longer than the timeout, PostgreSQL is considered unhealthy and the other nodes becomes eligible to take the leader lock.

  • Fix pg_rewind behavior in a pause mode. (Ants)

    Avoid unnecessary restart in a pause mode when Patroni thinks it needs to rewind but rewind is not possible (i.e. pg_rewind is not present). Fallback to default libpq values for the superuser (default OS user) if superuser authentication is missing from the pg_rewind related Patroni configuration section.

  • Serialize callback execution. Kill the previous callback of the same type when the new one is about to run. Fix the issue of spawning zombie processes when running callbacks. (Alexander)

  • Avoid promoting a former master when the leader key is set in DCS but update to this leader key fails. (Alexander)

    This avoids the issue of a current master continuing to keep its role when it is partitioned together with the minority of nodes in Etcd and other DCSs that allow "inconsistent reads".

Miscellaneous

  • Add post_init configuration option on bootstrap. (Alejandro Martínez)

    Patroni will call the script argument of this option right after running initdb and starting up PostgreSQL for a new cluster. The script receives a connection URL with superuser and sets PGPASSFILE to point to the .pgpass file containing the password. If the script fails, Patroni initialization fails as well. It is useful for adding new users or creating extensions in the new cluster.

  • Implement PostgreSQL 9.6 support. (Alexander)

    Use wal_level = replica as a synonym for hot_standby , avoiding pending_restart flag when it changes from one to another. (Alexander)

Documentation improvements

  • Add a Patroni main loop workflow diagram . (Alejandro, Alexander)

  • Improve README, adding the Helm chart and links to release notes. (Lauri Apple)

  • Move Patroni documentation to Read the Docs . The up-to-date documentation is available at https://patroni.readthedocs.io . (Oleksii)

    Makes the documentation easily viewable from different devices (including smartphones) and searchable.

  • Move the package to the semantic versioning. (Oleksii)

    Patroni will follow the major.minor.patch version schema to avoid releasing the new minor version on small but critical bugfixes. We will only publish the release notes for the minor version, which will include all patches.

Version 1.1

This release improves management of Patroni cluster by bring in pause mode, improves maintenance with scheduled and conditional restarts, makes Patroni interaction with Etcd or Zookeeper more resilient and greatly enhances patronictl.

Upgrade notice

When upgrading from releases below 1.0 read about changing of credentials and configuration format at 1.0 release notes.

Pause mode

  • Introduce pause mode to temporary detach Patroni from managing PostgreSQL instance (Murat Kabilov, Alexander Kukushkin, Oleksii Kliukin).

    Previously, one had to send SIGKILL signal to Patroni to stop it without terminating PostgreSQL. The new pause mode detaches Patroni from PostgreSQL cluster-wide without terminating Patroni. It is similar to the maintenance mode in Pacemaker. Patroni is still responsible for updating member and leader keys in DCS, but it will not start, stop or restart PostgreSQL server in the process. There are a few exceptions, for instance, manual failovers, reinitializes and restarts are still allowed. You can read a detailed description of this feature .

In addition, patronictl supports new pause and resume commands to toggle the pause mode.

Scheduled and conditional restarts

  • Add conditions to the restart API command (Oleksii)

    This change enhances Patroni restarts by adding a couple of conditions that can be verified in order to do the restart. Among the conditions are restarting when PostgreSQL role is either a master or a replica, checking the PostgreSQL version number or restarting only when restart is necessary in order to apply configuration changes.

  • Add scheduled restarts (Oleksii)

    It is now possible to schedule a restart in the future. Only one scheduled restart per node is supported. It is possible to clear the scheduled restart if it is not needed anymore. A combination of scheduled and conditional restarts is supported, making it possible, for instance, to scheduled minor PostgreSQL upgrades in the night, restarting only the instances that are running the outdated minor version without adding postgres-specific logic to administration scripts.

  • Add support for conditional and scheduled restarts to patronictl (Murat).

    patronictl restart supports several new options. There is also patronictl flush command to clean the scheduled actions.

Robust DCS interaction

  • Set Kazoo timeouts depending on the loop_wait (Alexander)

    Originally, ping_timeout and connect_timeout values were calculated from the negotiated session timeout. Patroni loop_wait was not taken into account. As a result, a single retry could take more time than the session timeout, forcing Patroni to release the lock and demote.

    This change set ping and connect timeout to half of the value of loop_wait, speeding up detection of connection issues and leaving enough time to retry the connection attempt before loosing the lock.

  • Update Etcd topology only after original request succeed (Alexander)

    Postpone updating the Etcd topology known to the client until after the original request. When retrieving the cluster topology, implement the retry timeouts depending on the known number of nodes in the Etcd cluster. This makes our client prefer to get the results of the request to having the up-to-date list of nodes.

    Both changes make Patroni connections to DCS more robust in the face of network issues.

Patronictl, monitoring and configuration

  • Return information about streaming replicas via the API (Feike Steenbergen)

Previously, there was no reliable way to query Patroni about PostgreSQL instances that fail to stream changes (for instance, due to connection issues). This change exposes the contents of pg_stat_replication via the /patroni endpoint.

  • Add patronictl scaffold command (Oleksii)

    Add a command to create cluster structure in Etcd. The cluster is created with user-specified sysid and leader, and both leader and member keys are made persistent. This command is useful to create so-called master-less configurations, where Patroni cluster consisting of only replicas replicate from the external master node that is unaware of Patroni. Subsequently, one may remove the leader key, promoting one of the Patroni nodes and replacing the original master with the Patroni-based HA cluster.

  • Add configuration option bin_dir to locate PostgreSQL binaries (Ants Aasma)

    It is useful to be able to specify the location of PostgreSQL binaries explicitly when Linux distros that support installing multiple PostgreSQL versions at the same time.

  • Allow configuration file path to be overridden using custom_conf of (Alejandro Martínez)

    Allows for custom configuration file paths, which will be unmanaged by Patroni, details .

Bug fixes and code improvements

  • Make Patroni compatible with new version schema in PostgreSQL 10 and above (Feike)

    Make sure that Patroni understand 2-digits version numbers when doing conditional restarts based on the PostgreSQL version.

  • Use pkgutil to find DCS modules (Alexander)

    Use the dedicated python module instead of traversing directories manually in order to find DCS modules.

  • Always call on_start callback when starting Patroni (Alexander)

    Previously, Patroni did not call any callbacks when attaching to the already running node with the correct role. Since callbacks are often used to route client connections that could result in the failure to register the running node in the connection routing scheme. With this fix, Patroni calls on_start callback even when attaching to the already running node.

  • Do not drop active replication slots (Murat, Oleksii)

    Avoid dropping active physical replication slots on master. PostgreSQL cannot drop such slots anyway. This change makes possible to run non-Patroni managed replicas/consumers on the master.

  • Close Patroni connections during start of the PostgreSQL instance (Alexander)

    Forces Patroni to close all former connections when PostgreSQL node is started. Avoids the trap of reusing former connections if postmaster was killed with SIGKILL.

  • Replace invalid characters when constructing slot names from member names (Ants)

    Make sure that standby names that do not comply with the slot naming rules don’t cause the slot creation and standby startup to fail. Replace the dashes in the slot names with underscores and all other characters not allowed in slot names with their unicode codepoints.

Version 1.0

This release introduces the global dynamic configuration that allows dynamic changes of the PostgreSQL and Patroni configuration parameters for the entire HA cluster. It also delivers numerous bugfixes.

Upgrade notice

When upgrading from v0.90 or below, always upgrade all replicas before the master. Since we don’t store replication credentials in DCS anymore, an old replica won’t be able to connect to the new master.

Dynamic Configuration

  • Implement the dynamic global configuration (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Introduce new REST API endpoint /config to provide PostgreSQL and Patroni configuration parameters that should be set globally for the entire HA cluster (master and all the replicas). Those parameters are set in DCS and in many cases can be applied without disrupting PostgreSQL or Patroni. Patroni sets a special flag called "pending restart" visible via the API when some of the values require the PostgreSQL restart. In that case, restart should be issued manually via the API.

    Patroni SIGHUP or POST to /reload will make it re-read the configuration file.

    See the dynamic configuration for the details on which parameters can be changed and the order of processing difference configuration sources.

    The configuration file format has changed since the v0.90. Patroni is still compatible with the old configuration files, but in order to take advantage of the bootstrap parameters one needs to change it. Users are encourage to update them by referring to the dynamic configuraton documentation page .

More flexible configuration*

  • Make postgresql configuration and database name Patroni connects to configurable (Misja Hoebe)

    Introduce database and config_base_name configuration parameters. Among others, it makes possible to run Patroni with PipelineDB and other PostgreSQL forks.

  • Implement possibility to configure some Patroni configuration parameters via environment (Alexander)

    Those include the scope, the node name and the namespace, as well as the secrets and makes it easier to run Patroni in a dynamic environment, i.e. Kubernetes Please, refer to the supported environment variables for further details.

  • Update the built-in Patroni docker container to take advantage of environment-based configuration (Feike Steenbergen).

  • Add Zookeeper support to Patroni docker image (Alexander)

  • Split the Zookeeper and Exhibitor configuration options (Alexander)

  • Make patronictl reuse the code from Patroni to read configuration (Alexander)

    This allows patronictl to take advantage of environment-based configuration.

  • Set application name to node name in primary_conninfo (Alexander)

    This simplifies identification and configuration of synchronous replication for a given node.

Stability, security and usability improvements

  • Reset sysid and do not call pg_controldata when restore of backup in progress (Alexander)

    This change reduces the amount of noise generated by Patroni API health checks during the lengthy initialization of this node from the backup.

  • Fix a bunch of pg_rewind corner-cases (Alexander)

    Avoid running pg_rewind if the source cluster is not the master.

    In addition, avoid removing the data directory on an unsuccessful rewind, unless the new parameter remove_data_directory_on_rewind_failure is set to true. By default it is false.

  • Remove passwords from the replication connection string in DCS (Alexander)

    Previously, Patroni always used the replication credentials from the Postgres URL in DCS. That is now changed to take the credentials from the patroni configuration. The secrets (replication username and password) and no longer exposed in DCS.

  • Fix the asynchronous machinery around the demote call (Alexander)

    Demote now runs totally asynchronously without blocking the DCS interactions.

  • Make patronictl always send the authorization header if it is configured (Alexander)

    This allows patronictl to issue "protected" requests, i.e. restart or reinitialize, when Patroni is configured to require authorization on those.

  • Handle the SystemExit exception correctly (Alexander)

    Avoids the issues of Patroni not stopping properly when receiving the SIGTERM

  • Sample haproxy templates for confd (Alexander)

    Generates and dynamically changes haproxy configuration from the patroni state in the DCS using confide

  • Improve and restructure the documentation to make it more friendly to the new users (Lauri Apple)

  • API must report role=master during pg_ctl stop (Alexander)

    Makes the callback calls more reliable, particularly in the cluster stop case. In addition, introduce the pg_ctl_timeout option to set the timeout for the start, stop and restart calls via the pg_ctl .

  • Fix the retry logic in etcd (Alexander)

    Make retries more predictable and robust.

  • Make Zookeeper code more resilient against short network hiccups (Alexander)

    Reduce the connection timeouts to make Zookeeper connection attempts more frequent.

Version 0.90

This releases adds support for Consul, includes a new noloadbalance tag, changes the behavior of the clonefrom tag, improves pg_rewind handling and improves patronictl control program.

Consul support

  • Implement Consul support (Alexander Kukushkin)

    Patroni runs against Consul, in addition to Etcd and Zookeeper. the connection parameters can be configured in the YAML file.

New and improved tags

  • Implement noloadbalance tag (Alexander)

    This tag makes Patroni always return that the replica is not available to the load balancer.

  • Change the implementation of the clonefrom tag (Alexander)

    Previously, a node name had to be supplied to the clonefrom , forcing a tagged replica to clone from the specific node. The new implementation makes clonefrom a boolean tag: if it is set to true, the replica becomes a candidate for other replicas to clone from it. When multiple candidates are present, the replicas picks one randomly.

Stability and security improvements

  • Numerous reliability improvements (Alexander)

    Removes some spurious error messages, improves the stability of the failover, addresses some corner cases with reading data from DCS, shutdown, demote and reattaching of the former leader.

  • Improve systems script to avoid killing Patroni children on stop (Jan Keirse, Alexander Kukushkin)

    Previously, when stopping Patroni, systemd also sent a signal to PostgreSQL. Since Patroni also tried to stop PostgreSQL by itself, it resulted in sending to different shutdown requests (the smart shutdown, followed by the fast shutdown). That resulted in replicas disconnecting too early and a former master not being able to rejoin after demote. Fix by Jan with prior research by Alexander.

  • Eliminate some cases where the former master was unable to call pg_rewind before rejoining as a replica (Oleksii Kliukin)

    Previously, we only called pg_rewind if the former master had crashed. Change this to always run pg_rewind for the former master as long as pg_rewind is present in the system. This fixes the case when the master is shut down before the replicas managed to get the latest changes (i.e. during the "smart" shutdown).

  • Numerous improvements to unit- and acceptance- tests, in particular, enable support for Zookeeper and Consul (Alexander).

  • Make Travis CI faster and implement support for running tests against Zookeeper (Exhibitor) and Consul (Alexander)

    Both unit and acceptance tests run automatically against Etcd, Zookeeper and Consul on each commit or pull-request.

  • Clear environment variables before calling PostgreSQL commands from Patroni (Feike Steenbergen)

    This prevents a possibility of reading system environment variables by connecting to the PostgreSQL cluster managed by Patroni.

Configuration and control changes

  • Unify patronictl and Patroni configuration (Feike)

    patronictl can use the same configuration file as Patroni itself.

  • Enable Patroni to read the configuration from the environment variables (Oleksii)

    This simplifies generating configuration for Patroni automatically, or merging a single configuration from different sources.

  • Include database system identifier in the information returned by the API (Feike)

  • Implement delete_cluster for all available DCSs (Alexander)

    Enables support for DCSs other than Etcd in patronictl.

Version 0.80

This release adds support for cascading replication and simplifies Patroni management by providing scheduled failovers . One may use older versions of Patroni (in particular, 0.78) combined with this one in order to migrate to the new release. Note that the scheduled failover and cascading replication related features will only work with Patroni 0.80 and above.

Cascading replication

  • Add support for the replicatefrom and clonefrom tags for the patroni node (Oleksii Kliukin).

The tag replicatefrom allows a replica to use an arbitrary node a source, not necessary the master. The clonefrom does the same for the initial backup. Together, they enable Patroni to fully support cascading replication.

  • Add support for running replication methods to initialize the replica even without a running replication connection (Oleksii).
This is useful in order to create replicas from the snapshots stored on S3 or FTP. A replication method that does not require a running replication connection should supply no_master: true in the yaml configuration. Those scripts will still be called in order if the replication connection is present.

Patronictl, API and DCS improvements

  • Implement scheduled failovers (Feike Steenbergen).

    Failovers can be scheduled to happen at a certain time in the future, using either patronictl, or API calls.

  • Add support for dbuser and password parameters in patronictl (Feike).

  • Add PostgreSQL version to the health check output (Feike).

  • Improve Zookeeper support in patronictl (Oleksandr Shulgin)

  • Migrate to python-etcd 0.43 (Alexander Kukushkin)

Configuration

  • Add a sample systems configuration script for Patroni (Jan Keirse).
  • Fix the problem of Patroni ignoring the superuser name specified in the configuration file for DB connections (Alexander).
  • Fix the handling of CTRL-C by creating a separate session ID and process group for the postmaster launched by Patroni (Alexander).

Tests

  • Add acceptance tests with behave in order to check real-world scenarios of running Patroni (Alexander, Oleksii).

    The tests can be launched manually using the behave command. They are also launched automatically for pull requests and after commits.

    Release notes for some older versions can be found on project’s github page .