Upgrade from a previous release

Cuckoo Sandbox grows really fast and in every release new features are added and some others are fixed or removed. There are two ways to upgrade your Cuckoo: start from scratch or migrate your “old” setup (migration is supported only starting from Cuckoo 0.6). The suggested way to upgrade Cuckoo is to start from a fresh setup because it’s easier and faster than migrate your old setup.

Upgrade starting from scratch

To start from scratch you have to perform a fresh setup as described in Installation. The following steps are suggested:

  1. Backup your installation.
  2. Read the documentation shipped with the new release.
  3. Make sure to have installed all required dependencies, otherwise install them.
  4. Do a Cuckoo fresh installation of the Host components.
  5. Reconfigure Cuckoo as explained in this book (copying old configuration files is not safe because options can change between releases).
  6. If you are using an external database instead of the default or you are using the MongoDb reporting module is suggested to start all databases from scratch, due to possible schema changes between Cuckoo releases.
  7. Test it!

If something goes wrong you probably failed to do some steps during the fresh installation or reconfiguration. Check again the procedure explained in this book.

It’s not recommended to rewrite an old Cuckoo installation with the latest release files, as it might raise some problems because:

  • You are overwriting Python source files (.py) but Python bytecode files (.pyc) are still in place.
  • There are configuration files changes across the two versions, check our CHANGELOG file for added or removed configuration options.
  • The part of Cuckoo which runs inside guests (agent.py) may change.
  • If you are using an external database like the reporting module for MongoDb a change in the data schema may corrupt your database.

Migrate your Cuckoo

Data migration is shipped starting from Cuckoo 1.1 and supports migration starting from Cuckoo 0.6. If your Cuckoo release is older than 0.6 you can’t migrate your data.

The following steps are suggested as requirement to migrate your data:

  1. Backup your installation.
  2. Read the documentation shipped with the new release.
  3. Make sure to have installed all required dependencies, otherwise install them.
  4. Download and extract the latest Cuckoo.
  5. Reconfigure Cuckoo as explained in this book (copying old configuration files is not safe because options can change between releases), and update agent in your virtual machines.
  6. Copy from your backup “storage” and “db” folders. (Reports and analyses already present in “storage” folder will keep the old format.)

Now setup Alembic (the framework used for migrations) and dateutil with:

pip install alembic
pip install python-dateutil

Enter the alembic migration directory in “utils/db_migration” with:

cd utils/db_migration

Before starting the migration script you must set your database connection in “cuckoo.conf” if you are using a custom one. Alembic migration script will use the database connection parameters configured in cuckoo.conf.

Again, please remember to backup before launching migration tool! A wrong configuration may corrupt your data, backup should save kittens!

Run the database migrations with:

alembic upgrade head