Updating Jails and Plugins

As of TrueNAS CORE 13.3, this feature is untested and provided without support to the TrueNAS Community.

Users with a critical need to use containers or virtualization solutions in production should migrate to the tested and supported virtualization features available in TrueNAS SCALE. TrueNAS Enterprise customers can contact iXsystems to schedule a TrueNAS SCALE deployment. See CORE to SCALE Migrations for more information.

The Jails screen displays a list of jails installed on your system.

Plugins are created as a jail with specific software installed in that jail. The update process for a jail and plugin is identical, while plugins have an additional step to update software installed inside the jail.

FreeBSD Jails are installed with a specific FreeBSD release, such as 12.3, 13.1, or 14.0. These major releases can have numerous patches to address issues with the release before the next release is available. Updating a jail applies the latest patch level to the installed FreeBSD release. Upgrading a jail adjusts the Jail to use a newer FreeBSD release.

Both updates and upgrades require the jail can connect to the update.FreeBSD.org mirrors.

To update a jail to the most current patch level of the installed FreeBSD release, go to Jails and find the installed jail. Click > to expand the jail and then click Update. This does not change the installed FreeBSD release. For example, a jail installed with FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE can update to p15 or the latest patch of 11.2, but not an 11.3-RELEASE-p# version of FreeBSD.

Using Upgrade replaces the jail FreeBSD operating system with a new release of FreeBSD, such as taking a jail from FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE to 11.3-RELEASE. To upgrade a jail, stop it, open the shell and enter command iocage upgrade name -r release, where name is the plugin jail name and release is the desired FreeBSD release. You might be prompted to approve additional FreeBSD component installation.

The jail upgrade process can take a long time to download the FreeBSD release and apply it to a jail. When the chosen FreeBSD release is already stored in the iocage dataset, the jail upgrade process is much faster.

Jail status messages and command output are stored in /var/log/iocage.log.

As a space saving measure, you can manually remove unused releases from the /iocage/releases/ dataset after upgrading a jail. The release must not be in use by any jail on the system.

Updating software installed in a jail requires the jail communicate with the online iocage plugins repository servers. The process involves opening a shell from within the running jail and using FreeBSD pkg commands to view and update the installed software.

To update the installed software stored within a Plugin jail, go to Jails and expand the installed plugin jail. Click > SHELL to open a command prompt from within the jail.

Enter pkg info to see a list of all installed software. This example shows the installed software from within the jail created when the Minio plugin was installed:

To update the installed software, enter pkg install name and replace name with the name returned from running pkg info. The command checks if an update is available and prompts to proceed when the software can be updated. This example shows attempting to update the minio software but no update was available.