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 an editor (nano for instance) and if necessary, add references to the Alpine package repositories. In the example below, the reference to the Alpine CD is maintained, so that if the 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

Another example: upgrading from version 3.3 to 3.4 simply change:

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

to

 http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.4/main

Thus, the file will now look like this:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

/media/cdrom/apks http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.4/main

Note: Starting with version 3.3, there is a new repository called community. Many packages have been moved from the main repository to community 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/v3.3/community

Only one repository is shown above; however, you may also replace http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/ with any of the mirrors from: http://rsync.alpinelinux.org/alpine/MIRRORS.txt

After updating the repositories file, obtain the latest index of available packages:

apk update

Tip: Adding the -U/--update-cache to another apk command, as in apk add -U ... or apk upgrade -U, has the same effect as running apk update before the other apk command.

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