Any risk of upgrading Ubuntu 17.10 --> 18.04.1 LTS

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1

Im running at Ubuntu 17.10. When I log into my terminal it says

New release ‘18.04.1 LTS’ available.
Run ‘do-release-upgrade’ to upgrade to it.

Is it safe to do? Will it break my docker and discourse?..

2

It’ll probably work. In my opinion it’s easier to install the new os and start fresh, but I’ve seen reports of upgrades wiring just fine.

In any case, make sure that you have a backup of Discourse and your app.yml. That’s all you need to restore discourse.

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3

If you’re using Docker from a separate repository, the upgrade mechanism might disable it and you need to later update/re-enable it to get to most recent Docker package to run Discourse.

I generally stick to LTS versions, on 16.04 I’ll get that every time I login. I would suggest an upgrade from 17.10 though, since the LTS versions have proven to be supported long term running stable. do-release-upgrade works fine, even from LTS to LTS.

Once there’s 20.04 LTS, stick with 18.04 for a while until at least the first point release is out.

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4

I just performed do-release-upgrade on one of my Production servers with no issues (apart from having to install the following packages in order to have that command available):

sudo apt-get install update-manager update-manager-core

I was upgrading from 16.04.

The server restarted and my Discourse instance appeared no problem.

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5

If it’s not a critical server it’s usually fine to do.

If uptime matters to you it’s always better to deploy a fresh box at the new software level and migrate your configuration. In the event something goes awry you will have an option to back out of the upgrade without losing data. Providing you’re using something like DO you won’t have two servers running in parallel for too long.

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6

You can also use an elastic ip (I think that’s what they call it) to switch over to the new server without waiting for dns to propagate.

  • Assign the elastic ip to the old server
  • Point dns to the elastic ip
  • set up new server
  • freeze old site and take backup
  • restore backup to new server
  • assign ip to new server
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7

You’re not supposed to use non-LTS distributions with Discourse anyway – we don’t recommend it.

Upgrading from one LTS release to another LTS release is safe, and has been done many times.

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