How to upgrade the distribution used by my droplet?

Heya,

The first and most important thing before you begin is to create a Snapshot of your Droplet in it’s current configuration where it works!

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/snapshots/

Snapshots are on-demand disk images of DigitalOcean Droplets and volumes saved to your account. Use them to create new Droplets and volumes with the same contents.

Now, once you have that, you just need to run

apt update
apt upgrade
do-release-upgrade

every time you up your distribution and follow the steps. Nothing more than that.

Hey!

I recently answered a similar question about this here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/easy-restart-question

There are a few things to consider here, but before making any upgrades it is always recomended to have a backup of your server. That way in case of anything going wrong, you can restore back to a working version of your server.

Ideally, I think the safest path that maximizes speed is to make a snapshot, make a duplicate Droplet from it, run do-release-upgrade on the duplicated Droplet. If it works, then you can decide how important that IP and uptime is to you and either stick with the new one or upgrade the old one. If it doesn’t, you know to set aside some time and then do a migration-style.

I would recommend going over that question above as it covers everything more in-depth!

If you decide to go with the upgrade, you can start with an upgrade from 18.x to 20.x first as described in this guide here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upgrade-to-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa

Let me know if you have any questions!

- Bobby