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How to upgrade Debian Wheezy to Debian Jessie

Before we begin, it’s important to take a backup of all the necessary data. The most crucial part of your backup includes directories like /etc and /home. And if you’ve database(s) then you should take their backup as well and they should be stored on an external hard disk, such as disk space on a remote server. To accomplish this goal and all other procedures for the upgrade from wheezy, we will follow the steps below:

  • Taking a backup of configuration and data
  • Inspect the apt sources.list file
  • Update Debian Wheezy packages
  • Check the package state to ensure that no packages are on hold or in half installed state
  • Update Debian Wheezy sources.list for Jessie
  • Just two steps for upgrading your Wheezy to Jessie
  • Check the update
  • Link to download Debian Jessie (and other versions)

Taking backup of configuration and data

take backup of /etc

 tar -pczf etc.tar.gz /etc

Take backup of the /var/www website directory
Note: your server may have it’s web files located on different directory depending on your web application (i.e. apache configuration)

 tar -pczf www.tar.gz /var/www

Take backup of the /home directory

 tar -pczf home.tar.gz /home

Take backup of the /var/log directory

 tar -pczf logs.tar.gz /var/log

Inspect the apt sources.list file

Before upgrading to Jessie, we’ll install any available updates for the currently installed version of Wheezy. On some installation the package source is defined as “stable” instead of “wheezy” in the sources.list file. This can accidentally upgrade your current distro to an early Jessie version. To avoid this, please ensure that sources.list doesn’t have “stable” written over there.

We’ll use nano file editor to open and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file.

 nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Once opened look for the lines below:

 deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main contrib
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib
deb http://security.debian.org wheezy/updates main contrib

Update Debian Wheezy packages

These following commands should install any pending updates for your Wheezy version. This will make sure that your system is in a great shape for the update to Jessie.

 apt-get update 
 apt-get upgrade 
 apt-get dist-upgrade

Check the package state to ensure that no packages are on hold or in half installed state

We will now check the state of installed packages to make sure neither of them are on-hold or half installed state. Your system and apt-database should be in a great shape before we could proceed with the distribution upgrade. If there are any broken or on-hold packages found, we must fix those issues before we could upgrade.

 dpkg --audit 
 dpkg --get-selections | grep hold

Only when both of the above command return no result we should proceed with the upgrade.

Update Debian Wheezy sources.list for Jessie

We will edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file once again:

 nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and then replace the content inside the file with the following lines:

 deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie main contrib
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-updates main contrib
deb http://security.debian.org jessie/updates main contrib

After updating the content run the following command to being updating

Just two steps for upgrading your Wheezy to Jessie

We will upgrade to Jessie by simply using two commands only. first one will be “apt-get upgrade” which will install the base packages and the second one will be “apt-get dist-upgrade” to upgrade the distribution itself.

 apt-get upgrade 
 apt-get dist-upgrade

Once the upgrade is completed, we’re required to reboot our system so that the new kernel is loaded on next boot:

 reboot

Check the update

To confirm that we’ve upgraded we should run the following command:

 cat /etc/os-release

If  we’ve successfully upgraded the result should be:

Link to download Debian Jessie (and other versions)

Download Debian from: http://www.debian.org/

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