Include:Upgrading to latest release

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
Enter e to edit /etc/apk/repositories. Change the version number by hand.
Or, edit the file in place. This is how you'd change v2.5 to v2.6:
sed -i -e 's/v2\.5/v2.6/g' /etc/apk/repositories

Or you could do this manually: Edit the /etc/apk/repositories file using any editor of your choice (nano for instance) to edit the Alpine Linux package repositories.

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

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

In the above file, to upgrade Alpine Linux from version 3.19 to 3.20, simply replace the number 3.19 by 3.20 in all the places, so that the updated repositories file looks like below:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/main
http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/community

If you're upgrading from a version of Alpine before 2.3.0_rc1, 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 your packages:

apk upgrade --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 require 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