v1.29.2

Release date: Jun 29, 2026

Important changes

• Updated the deprecation notice for native (in-tree) Barman Cloud support to reflect that it will now be removed in CloudNativePG 1.31.0, rather than 1.30.0. Users are still encouraged to migrate to the Barman Cloud Plugin. (#11083)

• The cluster reference is now immutable on the Database, Pooler, Publication, Subscription, and ScheduledBackup resources. Pointing one of these objects at a different cluster has no well-defined semantics and previously left the controllers in an inconsistent state; the update is now rejected at the API server via a CEL validation rule. (#10743)

Enhancements

• Enabled pg_upgrade in-place major upgrades to PostgreSQL 19 or later for clusters that use Image Volume extensions, building on the extension-path support added to pg_upgrade in PostgreSQL 19. During the upgrade Job, the source- and target-version extension images are mounted side by side, so the old server keeps its libraries and a failed upgrade reverts cleanly. (#10366)

• Added a label selector to the Cluster scale subresource (status.selector), making a Cluster a valid targetRef for the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), which can now map a Cluster to its instance pods. Contributed by @sebv004. (#8996)

• The operator now emits a Warning PrimaryStatusCheckFailed event on the Cluster when the primary pod is Ready from the kubelet perspective but the operator's /pg/status check fails and failover is deferred, giving users visibility into the deferral via kubectl describe cluster. (#10509)

• The operator now reloads a CNPG-i plugin automatically when its pods are rolled: it watches the EndpointSlices backing plugin Services and re-enqueues every cluster using the plugin once the new pods become Ready, so an upgraded plugin is picked up without waiting for the next resync. (#10836)

Security and Supply Chain

• CVE-2026-55769 / GHSA-x8c2-3p4r-v9r6: search_path pinning on operator-issued connections: a database owner could plant overloaded built-in operators in the public schema and alter the search_path so that operator introspection probes, running as the cluster superuser, resolved those overloads before pg_catalog, a CWE-426 privilege-escalation chain (same class as CVE-2018-1058) that could lead to in-pod RCE via COPY ... FROM PROGRAM. The operator now pins search_path = pg_catalog, public, pg_temp on every pooled connection so it ships in the startup message and takes precedence over tenant-controlled defaults. (#10774, GHSA-x8c2-3p4r-v9r6)

• CVE-2026-55765 / GHSA-w3gf-xc94-wvmj: operator-side SCRAM-SHA-256 password encoding: the operator now SCRAM-SHA-256 encodes cleartext role passwords before issuing CREATE/ALTER ROLE ... PASSWORD, so the literal PostgreSQL parses (and that extensions such as pg_stat_statements or pgaudit may capture) is the SCRAM verifier rather than the cleartext secret. Pre-hashed (MD5 or SCRAM) values are forwarded unchanged, and the per-Secret annotation cnpg.io/passwordPassthrough: "enabled" opts out. (#10724, GHSA-w3gf-xc94-wvmj)

Changes

• Added support for Kubernetes 1.36. (#10900)

• Updated the default PostgreSQL version to 18.4. (#10719)

• Updated the Kubernetes versions used to test the operator on public cloud providers. (#10720, #10563, #11033)

Fixes

• Fixed spec.postgresql.parameters accepting keys that are not valid PostgreSQL parameter names, which could inject arbitrary directives into postgresql.conf; key names are now validated by the webhook. (#11029)

• Fixed declarative Database, Publication, and Subscription objects reporting a stale primary-side status forever after their cluster was demoted to a replica; the controller now re-checks the replica condition and watches the Cluster so a demotion is detected promptly. (#10871)

• Fixed non-sequential pod names (for example -1, -3) caused by the instance serial counter being advanced before the corresponding Job and PVCs were created; the bump is now persisted only after those resources exist. (#10491)

• Fixed a switchover deadlock when a WAL-archiver plugin was enabled on an existing cluster: with primaryUpdateMethod: switchover the primary could not be rolled out because a clean demotion needs the archiver sidecar that is still missing. The operator now recreates the primary Pod in place so the sidecar is injected and archiving resumes. The check also covers plugins that inject the archiver as a native sidecar (an init container with restartPolicy: Always), such as the Barman Cloud plugin. (#11032, #11059)

• Fixed a cluster staying in Setting up primary indefinitely when the instance-creation Job exhausted its backoff limit; the operator now detects the terminal Job failure and marks the cluster unrecoverable, naming the failed Job and pointing to its logs. (#11035)

• Fixed deletion of a Database, Publication, or Subscription getting stuck in Terminating on a replica cluster, where the replica gate ran before the finalizer reconciler and the finalizer was never released. On a replica the PostgreSQL object is left to the primary cluster. (#10853)

• Fixed a conflicting duplicate Database or Subscription with a delete reclaim policy dropping the PostgreSQL object owned by the surviving CR; the drop is now gated on a recorded reconciliation. (#10870)

• Fixed the postgres superuser being left locked out after superuser access was disabled and then re-enabled, because the cached secret version was not invalidated and the password was never re-applied. Diagnosed by @mhartmann-jaconi. (#10834)

• Fixed backups getting stuck in the started phase when the instance manager running them was restarted (for example by the in-place upgrade following an operator upgrade) before the backup reached running; the reconciliation is now rescheduled so the lost session is detected. (#10859)

• Fixed exec/attach streaming to negotiate WebSocket with a SPDY fallback, restoring compatibility both with Kubernetes versions that have removed SPDY and with platforms such as OpenShift that reject WebSocket exec upgrades. Contributed by @bartscheers. (#10876, #10933)

• Fixed resource leaks when concurrent Backup objects raced: backups now run in strict creation-time order, so an already-executing backup is never preempted by a newer one and its replication slot and PostgreSQL session are no longer orphaned on the primary. Contributed by @GabriFedi97. (#10747)

• Fixed role reconciliation clearing the password on a PostgreSQL role when the referenced Secret could not be fetched; the role is now left untouched until the Secret becomes available, and per-action errors are aggregated for better visibility. (#10053)

• Fixed a bootstrap failure where a metrics-exporter setup error (commonly a duplicate-key race with the controller) rolled back streaming_replica creation and wedged replica joins. The metrics-exporter step now runs in a separate transaction. Contributed by @BlaiseAntony. (#10749)

• Fixed a ScheduledBackup controller loop that occurred when a Backup was created but its status patch never landed; the controller now adopts an existing Backup for the next iteration instead of looping on AlreadyExists. (#10612)

• Fixed a nil-pointer panic when reconciling a Pooler whose Cluster has been deleted. (#10667)

• Fixed bootstrap log handling so that all named log pipes (postgres, postgres.csv, and postgres.json) get consumers during WithActiveInstance, preventing regular files from being created in place of the named pipes. (#10043)

• Fixed generation of invalid IPv6 URLs by wrapping the address in square brackets. Contributed by @Infinoid. (#10682)

• Fixed an external cluster plugin still being treated as active when its configuration set enabled: false. (#10932)

• Fixed a race during bootstrap recovery from an object store where the restore job could read a stale Cluster (primary not yet recorded and timeline still unset) and have its .history files rejected by the split-brain guard. When this happened, recovery stopped at the base backup's timeline and silently dropped transactions committed on later timelines. History files are now allowed while the cluster timeline is unset. Contributed by @dennispidun. (#10818)

• Fixed a cache race during cluster creation when the server and client CA resolve to the same Secret (the default): a stale informer cache triggered a redundant Create that failed with AlreadyExists and could leave the cluster stuck in Unable to create required cluster objects. The operator now reuses the already-fetched CA Secret when the names match. (#10989)

• Fixed the pg_basebackup bootstrap path overwriting or failing on a pre-existing PGDATA (for example after a replica Pod restart) by enforcing the same pre-flight directory check already applied by the other bootstrap methods; this also protects statically provisioned PVCs from being silently overwritten. (#11006)

• Fixed the Cluster phase flapping between Healthy and a plugin-failure phase when a post-reconcile plugin hook returned an error; the Healthy phase is now registered as the last step of a successful reconciliation, so a loop that ends in a plugin error never reports Healthy. Contributed by @GabriFedi97. (#10421)

• Fixed stale certificate data and partial reads after an external server's Secret was rotated (for example a CA bundle shrinking from two certificates to one): the file is now written atomically, so libpq always reads either the old or the new value, never a mix. Contributed by @Anand-240. (#10975)

• Fixed plugin connectivity to use the plugin Service FQDN instead of its short name, avoiding failures when a cluster-level proxy is automatically injected into pods. Contributed by @kdautrey. (#10921)

• Fixed excessive operator log noise from the per-request Cluster create/update validation webhook messages, now logged at debug instead of info. (#10984)

• Fixed a first-primary bootstrap deadlock where a status-patch conflict after the data PVC was created but before the initialization Job was started left the orphan Pending PVC counted as an instance, blocking the bootstrap gate; the PVC-state reconciler now recreates the bootstrap Job reusing the assigned serial. (#11039)

• Fixed external cluster names and secret selector references being joined into filesystem paths without validation, letting a .. component or path separator escape the external secrets directory when the instance manager dumps connection material; these values are now rejected at the validating webhook and re-checked at the write site. Reported by @r0binak. (#11045)

• Fixed a backup getting stuck in pending forever: the concurrent-backup gate ran on every reconcile and could overwrite an already-completed phase written asynchronously by the instance manager. The gate now runs only while the backup phase is still unset or pending. (#11056)

• Fixed a declarative VolumeSnapshot backup being permanently marked as failed when a stale cache made the operator re-create a snapshot it had already provisioned, failing with AlreadyExists. The operator now tolerates the collision when the existing snapshot carries this backup's label and adopts it; a collision with a foreign snapshot still surfaces as an error. (#11071)

• Fixed a volume snapshot backup being discarded on a transient instance-manager connection error (for example a dial timeout from a brief pod-network disruption) during the finalize step, even when its snapshots were already provisioned; such network errors are now retried instead of treated as terminal. (#11069)

• Fixed a replica switchover losing its status.demotionToken when a reconcile was requeued between storing the token and cleaning up the transition metadata (for example a cleanup patch failing against a flaky webhook); the empty no-change token is no longer patched back over the stored value. (#11075)

• cnpg plugin:

  • Fixed kubectl cnpg psql on Windows, where execution relied on a Unix-only system call and failed with "not supported by windows"; Windows now launches kubectl exec as a child process. Contributed by @Utkarsh-sharma47. (#10972)

  • Fixed an unbounded memory leak in kubectl cnpg logs -f on busy clusters, where a per-log-group timer was never released; timers are now reused across iterations. Contributed by @Anand-240. (#10976)