The Care and Feeding of Your Posit Products
Once the install of the products is done, as an Admin, you own an ongoing set of responsibilities: patching the operating system, renewing certificates and licenses, upgrading the products, and making sure you have functional backups.This course gives you a routine to follow so your installation stays up-to-date.
How to think about maintenance
A handful of habits and planed can help you keep your Posit products running smoothly.
- Upgrade on a regular cadence so you stay inside the support window. Once a version falls out of support, you stop getting security patches, and Posit may not be able to address your tickets.
- Read the release notes. Do not upgrade without a staging server to test the new versions, and promote to production after testing it.
- Perform user testing in staging prior to upgrading production. Have representative end users complete real workflows in the environment to confirm it meets business needs before going live, and not just that the product is installed and running.
- Back up regularly and before every change. Consider creating your staging server from a backup as a test to ensure their operation. Having a separate staging server will give you a starting point to test upgrades.
- Stop the service before starting your backups. If it keeps writing while you copy the database and data directory, your backups may not work.
- Do not upgrade the operating system in place. Build a fresh environment with the new OS version and cut over to it rather than upgrading the running server underneath the product.
- Communicate with your users before upgrading your production environment. Anyone who depends on the service should know before you start, and be informed of changes and new features that come with product upgrades.
As noted in our Support Agreement, each software edition is supported for 18 months based on its year-month version numbers. The support window for each product is listed on our Supported Version page.
Maintenance cadence
Maintaining your Posit environment relies on tasks with different cadences: some are daily habits, others come up once a year. The table below gives you a starting point for how often to do each one and where in this course to find the details.
| Task | Typical cadence | Covered in |
|---|---|---|
| Review logs / health checks | Daily–weekly | Routine maintenance |
| Verify backups ran; test a restore | Weekly / monthly | Backups and staging |
| OS security patches | Monthly (or per CVE) | Routine maintenance |
| TLS certificate renewal | Per expiry (often annual) | Routine maintenance |
| License usage review | Monthly | Managing licenses |
| Posit license renewal | Annual (watch expiry warnings) | Managing licenses |
| R / Python / Quarto / pro-driver updates | Quarterly | Routine maintenance |
| Product upgrade (Posit software) | At least every 18 months; quarterly or monthly recommended | Upgrades |
| Capacity / scaling review | Quarterly | Scaling and observability |
| OS major-version upgrade | As needed (migrate, don’t upgrade in place) | Migration |
You can practice many of the recommendations for this course on a staging server built from a backup. See Backups and staging.