How To Upgrade Debian 9 to Debian 10 Buster

The Debian team has announced the latest version Debian 10 “Buster” released on July 6th, 2019. This release has code name “Buster“. Debian 10 is full of new features and upgrades than the previous release.

In this tutorial, I will help you to Upgrade Debian 10 Buster from Debian 9 Stretch with simple steps. In this tutorial, all commands are running with the root account. So you must have root user privilege or sudo privileges to complete this. The Desktop users can upgrade it immediately and use the new features, But the users with Debian servers can wait for their production upgrades. First, they should try this in their development environment and then upgrade on production, if everything goes fine.

1. Backup Your Data

The first and very important step is to backup your data. So we strongly recommend you to backup any data which is important for you in existing system. For example, Your Mariadb will be upgraded to version 10.3 and you can’t revert it back. So make sure backup your data to a remote location and after that proceed for upgrade. You may need to backup followings:

• Application codebases
• Databases
• Configuration files (eg: DNS, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Postgres etc)
• Emails and email accounts.
• User accounts details.

2. Upgrade Current Packages

Before upgrading to Debian 10, first update all packages of current installed Debian system using the following command.

sudo apt update && apt upgrade

3. Update sources.list File

Now edit Debian apt configuration file /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all “stretch” with “buster” to get Debian 9 packages. Use sed command to replace all instances at once as following

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig
sudo sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

The /etc/apt/sources.list file will look like below.

deb http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/debian buster main
deb-src http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/debian buster main

deb http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main

# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/debian buster-updates main
deb-src http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/debian buster-updates main

4. Upgrade to Debian 10 (Buster)

After replacing all references in the Apt configuration file, Update all the packages on your system again. After that proceed to upgrade distribution.

sudo apt update && apt upgrade

At this stage, my system got upgraded to Debian 10. But I still executed the dist-upgrade commands as per previous version upgrades.

sudo apt dist-upgrade

5. Verify Upgrade

At this point, your system will have upgraded successfully to Debian 10. Let’s reboot the instance first and check the version of the upgraded system.

sudo reboot

After rebooting system, Login to serer Verify current version of Debian.

lsb_release -a

Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 10.0 (buster)
Release:        10
Codename:       buster

Congratulation’s, You have successfully upgraded to Debian 10 “Buster”. Have fun!