Upgrade standalone Elastic Agents

To upgrade a standalone agent running on an edge node:

Make sure the elastic-agent service is running.
From the directory where Elastic Agent is installed, run the upgrade command to upgrade to a new version. Not sure where the agent is installed? Refer to Installation layout.

For example, on macOS, to upgrade the agent from version 8.8.0 to 8.8.1, you would run:
```
cd /Library/Elastic/Agent/
sudo elastic-agent upgrade 8.8.1
```

This command upgrades the binary. Your agent policy should continue to work, but you might need to upgrade it to use new features and capabilities.

For more command-line options, see the help for the upgrade command.

Upgrading standalone Elastic Agent in an air-gapped environmment

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The basic upgrade scenario should work for most use cases. However, in an air-gapped environment Elastic Agent is not able to access the Elastic Artifact Registry at artifacts.elastic.co directly.

As an alterative, you can do one of the following:

Configure a proxy server for standalone Elastic Agent to access the Elastic Artifact Registry.
Host your own artifact registry for standalone Elastic Agent to access binary downloads.

Refer to Air-gapped environments for more details.

Verifying Elastic Agent package signatures

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Standalone Elastic Agent verifies each package that it downloads using publically available SHA hash and .asc PGP signature files. The SHA file is used to verify that the package has not been modified, and the .asc file is used to verify that the package was released by Elastic. For this purpose, the Elastic public GPG key is embedded in Elastic Agent itself.

At times, the Elastic private GPG key may need to be rotated, either due to the key expiry or due to the private key having been exposed. In this case, standalone Elastic Agent upgrades can fail because the embedded public key no longer works.

In the event of a private GPG key rotation, you can use the following options with the upgrade command to either skip the verification process (not recommended) or force Elastic Agent to use a new public key for verification:

--skip-verify

Skip the package verification process. This option is not recommended as it is insecure.

Example:

./elastic-agent upgrade 8.8.0 --skip-verify

--pgp-path <string>

Use a locally stored copy of the PGP key to verify the upgrade package.

Example:

./elastic-agent upgrade 8.8.0 --pgp-path /home/elastic-agent/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch

--pgp-uri <string>

Use the specified online PGP key to verify the upgrade package.

Example:

./elastic-agent upgrade 8.7.0-SNAPSHOT --pgp-uri "https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch"

Under the basic upgrade scenario standalone Elastic Agent will automatically fetch the most current public key, however in an air-gapped environment or in the event that the Elastic Artifact Registry is otherwise inaccessible, these commands can be used instead.

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