Upgrade your Renku project

Renku is in constant flux! This means that often there are changes to RenkuLab (e.g. the web platform (UI) and the knowledge graph (KG)), and the renku command-line interface (CLI). These docs will explain how to benefit from changes to the renku CLI when you’re using a session on RenkuLab. You can find the changes in the renku-python docs.

If you’re instead looking for a list of new features available in RenkuLab, they are announced in the Release notes. When we update components of the RenkuLab platform, you won’t usually have to do anything special. E.g. when we added the ability for anonymous (not logged in) users to launch sessions, each project was immediately accessible without the project owner needing to change any settings.

Upgrading the renku CLI version used in your sessions

Note

This section is for upgrading the version of renku CLI installed into the Sessions on RenkuLab for your project. See Upgrading for upgrading your local machine’s version of renku.

When we release a new version of the renku CLI, you do have to make some (minimal) changes to the Dockerfile in your project to use it in your interactive sessions on RenkuLab.

The version of the renku CLI is defined in the base image specified in the ARG RENKU_VERSION line of the Dockerfile in your project repo (if you don’t see this line in your Dockerfile your project was made using an older template). All you need to do to have a different version of the Renku CLI installed is modify the version on that line and push the change. Once that is done, the image will automatically be built as usual and include the new version.

Upgrading the base image used for interactive sessions

In addition to updating the CLI version, you may also want to update the base image used for sessions in your project. We periodically release new base images with upgrades to underlying libraries and packages. The base image is specified on the ARG RENKU_BASE_IMAGE line in your Dockerfile, for example it might read renku/renkulab-py:3.9-0.11.0. This means that it is a python-based image using Python 3.9 and image release 0.11.0. To change it, simply modify the base image referenced on that line. For a list of base images see current images. When choosing an updated image, try to stick to released versions like renku/renkulab-py:3.9-0.11.0 and not ones that include a commit hash like renku/renkulab-py:3.9-14f93c5. Those are to be considered “development” versions. Note: changing the base image does not automatically mean that the Renku CLI version will also change - see the section above for details on how to update it.