Question

Change droplet OS

With the announcement that Centos is moving to Centos Stream, and support for Centos 8 will end in 2021, is there a safe way to migrate the files (webserver, sql server) to a different OS. The goal is to move from Centos to Debian or one of the other servers with little to no downtime. What would be the safest way to do this? Thank you in advance

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

awww • December 20, 2020
Accepted Answer

You can also run the following three commands (as root) and migrate your server to CentOS Stream:

dnf -y install centos-release-stream
dnf -y swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos
dnf -y distro-sync

That’s it.

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

Bobby Iliev • December 16, 2020

Hi there @mywritingblock,

I personally believe that the safest way to do this is to follow these steps here:

  • Spin up a new Droplet with the desired OS
  • Install the necessary services (webserver, sql server, etc.)
  • After that using rsync for example copy over your files and migrate your databases
  • Then test your website and server fully to make sure that everything is working as expected
  • Finally change your DNS to point to the new Droplet

Regards, Bobby

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up