Problem with the background migration BackfillAdminModeScopeForPersonalAccessTokens: personal_access_tokens that fails after updating GitLab from version 15.4.6 to 15.8.1.

At the moment, Google doesn’t return anything for "BackfillAdminModeScopeForPersonalAccessTokens", but searching directly on GitLab.com I found an issue. Interestingly, bing.com and duckduckgo.com find it.

Problem

Cause of the problem

On the GitLab machine, in the command line, go to the GitLab DB prompt

1

gitlab-rails db

And execute

1
2
3

SELECT t.id,u.name,t.name,t.revoked,t.scopes
FROM personal_access_tokens t
JOIN users u ON t.user_id = u.id;

The problem is the scopes starting with :

Solutions

Remove the : from the scopes

I prefer this. Remove the : from the scopes (replace only removes the first occurrence of the string, great!)

1
2

UPDATE personal_access_tokens
SET scopes = replace(scopes, ':', '');

Or you can revoke the tokens, as below.

Revoke the tokens

Revoke the tokens that have : in the scope, something like

1
2
3

UPDATE personal_access_tokens
SET revoked = 't'
WHERE id in (4, 2 ,6);

Manually run the background migration

Which should run successfully 🎉🎉🎉

References

• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/388935