By Kegan Gan
I have a Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS running a few Django applications. I keep seeing this when I login.
New release '16.04.2 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.
Should I do the release upgrade?
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Accepted Answer
Before doing a release upgrade, create a snapshot of your Droplet. Upgrading releases can lead to some rather unexpected results if your application isn’t compatible with new software versions that will be installed when you upgrade.
For example, I’ll use PHP. Older Ubuntu versions have PHP 5.x in their repositories while the newer releases have PHP 7.0.x. When performing a release upgrade, PHP 5.x becomes 7.0.x, so any PHP applications on the server that are not fully compatible with PHP 7.0 break instantly.
The same is true for many languages.
My recommendation would be to deploy a new Droplet with Ubuntu 16.04 and migrate your app over to it instead of upgrading the release, unless you’re sure newer software versions will not break or cause issues with your current application(s).
snapshots are good only as a backup. it serves no purpose whatsoever in case of an upgrade or update!! you still need to spin up a brand new droplet from scratch and copy all the files from the old droplet to the new one with an ftp client.
tom
we followed your recommendation by spinning up a new droplet and migrated the snapshot droplet to the new one. however, the ubunta, php and mysql are still the old ones. Isn’t it true that all the newly created droplets have the latest ubunta, php and mysql installed? If not, how can we install the latest ubunta, php and mysql versions? any idea?
thanks in advance.
tom
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