Include:Upgrading to latest release

From Alpine Linux
Revision as of 16:41, 29 October 2012 by Dubiousjim (talk | contribs) (reorganize, merge in info from "Upgrading from 2.1 to Alpine Linux 2.2 and later")

When Alpine Linux is installed to hard drive, upgrading to a newer stable version is straightforward.

To begin, you need to update your /etc/apk/repositories file. Here are some shortcuts for doing so:

  • Launch

    setup-apkrepos

    Press e to edit /etc/apk/repositories. Change the version number by hand.
  • Or, edit the file in place. This is how you'd change v2.3 to v2.4:

    sed -i -e 's/v2\.3/v2.4/g' /etc/apk/repositories

Or you could do this manually: Edit the /etc/apk/repositories file using an editor (nano for instance) and if necessary, add references to the Alpine package repositories. In the example below, the file references the Alpine CD, so that if a requested package is available on the local media, it will be obtained from there instead of being downloaded from the remote repository:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

/media/cdrom/apks http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.3/main

To upgrade, in this example, from version 3.3 to 3.19, simply change:

http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.3/main

to

http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.19/main

So that the file will look like this:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

/media/cdrom/apks http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.19/main
Note: Starting with version 3.3, there is a new repository called community. Many packages have been moved from the main repository to the community repository to indicate that they are not guaranteed to be supported beyond six months. If you are using any of these packages, be sure to add the community repository. For example: http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.19/community

Above, only one possible repository is shown, however, http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/ may also be replaced with any geographically close mirror from: http://rsync.alpinelinux.org/alpine/MIRRORS.txt

Updating package lists

With the correct repositories file in place, the latest index list of available packages can be obtained with:

apk update

Tip: Adding the --update-cache or -U to another apk command, as in apk add -U ... or apk upgrade -U, has the same effect as always running apk update immediately before the other apk command. Instead of auto-update it only if the index has not been updated recently.

Next, ensure you have the latest available version of the Alpine Linux Package Manager first before upgrading anything else:

apk add --upgrade apk-tools

Next, upgrade all packages in one shot:

apk upgrade --update-cache --available

The --available switch is used to force all packages to be upgraded, even if they have the same version numbers. Sometimes changes in uClibc have required doing this.

Note: You will need to restart any services that have been upgraded to begin using the upgraded versions. If the kernel is upgraded, you will need to reboot to begin using the upgraded version:

sync reboot