Preferred Cpanel Build?

[oshs]

Hi all,

I just wanted to get everyone's opinion on what is your preferred Cpanel build.

Do you use STABLE or RELEASE and why?

I know that STABLE only has the most mature changes built into it, but have you found it to be more "stable" than the release build?

What does Cpanel recommend? Do you find users running STABLE have less support issues?

A question for Cpanel is - are the latest changes made to EA3 built into STABLE? How stable is stable?

After many years running Cpanel servers, personally I've been using RELEASE to pull in bug fixes, latest scripts etc, but I have noticed that servers running STABLE generally have much less problems - i.e. small things such as needing to re-install Exim or FTP, restarting services etc

Everyone's input would be much appreciated, especially from Cpanel staff.

Regards,
Suhail.

 

[cPanelDavidG]

...
What does Cpanel recommend? Do you find users running STABLE have less support issues?

A question for Cpanel is - are the latest changes made to EA3 built into STABLE? How stable is stable?
...

By default, all new installations of cPanel/WHM are on RELEASE. I suppose you could take that as a recommendation. Generally what I say though is find the right build that works best for your particular situation. If you absolutely require stability and wish to encounter only a minimum of malfunction, go with STABLE. If you're a bit more flexible in terms of being able to cope with any issues that didn't come up during our quality assurance testing, then go with CURRENT. RELEASE is a good happy medium of stability with new functionality, hence many seem to stick with RELEASE.

There's also EDGE with all the latest new features, but that is only intended for development use. It is not a production worthy build and should not be used on production web servers.

As for support issues, I'm not a support tech so I am not aware of support trends .

EA3 has been built into STABLE for about 2 months now. Keep in mind the EasyApache 3 builds are independent of cPanel builds. So all the latest fixes and changes for EA3 are always available to all builds.

STABLE is very stable. I run my personal websites on a server running STABLE just because I like the whole "set it and forget it" approach for non-critical sites/services. Of course, I am the last to see any of the cool new features propagating through the builds, but that's the price I pay for stability.

 

[Infopro]

STABLE these days. My life is exciting enough as it is. :p

http://changelog.cpanel.net/

 

[chopperb]

I run current on 3 servers.

 

[trevHCS]

I think our 3 run Release simply because it never really seems to have any issues and it's nice to have the features being talked about on here instead of waiting ages for them to appear in stable. Those servers run in the region of 400 web sites and around a million uniques a month average, so no complaints yet.

Trev

 

[oshs]

Can you give some examples of features in RELEASE which aren't yet in STABLE?

 

[cPanelDavidG]

Can you give some examples of features in RELEASE which aren't yet in STABLE?

The latest STABLE and RELEASE releases were 5 days ago, so there are not yet any features in the latest RELEASE that are not in the latest STABLE.

The next time you see a release of RELEASE without a release of STABLE on the same day, check the changelog at http://changelog.cpanel.net to note the functionality RELEASE has that STABLE would not have at that time.

 

[rpmws]

edge manual only ..but lately it's been pushed out to the rest also ..so most of us wind up with same version anyway.

 

[sparek-3]

Another thing to consider is how many servers you are maintaining.

Edge gets updated most often, followed by Current, Release, and finally Stable which usually does not get updated very often.

If you have several servers, then using Edge would probably be unfeasible if you want to keep all of the servers on the same build. You would be updated each server everyday and introducing new features (and new bugs) to all of your users and all of your servers. This is the main reason Edge is not allowed to be automatically updated.

This same principle applies with the Current build, though updates are less frequent, but considerably more frequent than Release or Stable.

To me the Release and Stable branches are practically the same. When a build hits Release, it usually means that a new Stable is just a few days, maybe a week, away.

Stable should be used if you are just wanting to be ultra conservative.

For me, I run Release on all of my servers, mainly because I have several servers that I maintain and its just easier to only have to do updates sparingly and the new features usually don't have any major bugs by the time they reach Release.

 

[jayh38]

I run RELEASE on 20 servers and update manually as needed and only after testing an update on one or two boxes first before applying to every server. If you have many boxes to maintain, I highly recommend manual updates and only when you deem necessary by the change log.

 

[Babysittah]

Of course it's easy to work with STABLE dude, don't get them thangz complicated yo