How to upgrade R on ubuntu 20.04 server to latest version along with all packages.

Hi there,

There can’t really be any guarantees if your code will work with the newer version of R. What I would suggest is to make sure to take a backup of your Droplet before proceeding with the upgrade:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/images/backups/

That way you can revert to a working version in case that anything goes wrong.

Regarding the upgrade itself, I could suggest following the official R installation guide:

# update indices
sudo apt update -qq
# install two helper packages we need
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common dirmngr
# add the signing key (by Michael Rutter) for these repos
# To verify key, run gpg --show-keys /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc 
# Fingerprint: E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
wget -qO- https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/marutter_pubkey.asc | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc
# add the R 4.0 repo from CRAN -- adjust 'focal' to 'groovy' or 'bionic' as needed
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-cran40/"

Best,

Bobby

Hi @sanjmeh,

There is never a 100% guarantee something won’t break when you update your server. Having said that, what could help is creating a backup prior to beginning the process. That way you can always revert back to a previous state. For this, I’ll recommend using the Snapshot product:

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

As for the upgrade, you can try the following:

# update indices
sudo apt update -qq
# install two helper packages we need
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common dirmngr
# add the signing key (by Michael Rutter) for these repos
# To verify key, run gpg --show-keys /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc 
# Fingerprint: E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
wget -qO- https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/marutter_pubkey.asc | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc
# add the R 4.0 repo from CRAN -- adjust 'focal' to 'groovy' or 'bionic' as needed
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-cran40/"

If there are any problems you can’t solve after the update, you can now always revert back to the previous option with the Snapshot image you created.