I’ve been running a LAMP stack setup on a Digital Ocean Droplet for over a year and wanted to upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 15.04. Following the steps below I was good to go in about 20 minutes. My setup is very basic – LAMP with one Koken photo gallery site.
> Full upgrade steps from Digital Ocean here
1) Backup Data – Make a local copy of important data.
2) Snapshot – First step is to take a snapshot so we have the ability to roll back if needed. Digital Ocean offers snapshots and backups ($1 a month) which are detailed here – Digital ocean backup and snapshot. Your sever will be offline throughout this process – for my photo site with 20gb disk and 512k ram the process took 15 minutes from start to finish.
- Power off your droplet via command line > ‘poweroff’
- Navigate to Settings in your droplet control panel
- Click Take Snapshot
- Power back on via droplet admin > Power
3) Upgrade Ubuntu – From Oliver Simon on the Digital Ocean forums
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4) Upgrade the Kernel – The kernel is managed through the control panel.
- Click on the “settings” tab of your droplet and select a kernel there.
- Power off from the command line and boot the server.
- The new kernel you selected will be activated.
