Upgrade from Debian 11 to Debian 12

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you will need:

• A Debian 11 server.
• Passbolt Debian package installed.
• Ensure you have sufficient space for the upgrade.

This manual has for aim to help you upgrade your distribution, but it does not replace the official Debian guide, please refer to it if you have any doubt.

1. Take down your site

It is generally a good idea to stop running the site prior to the upgrade. This is to avoid having side effects such as active users corrupting the data in the middle of an upgrade.

$ sudo systemctl stop nginx

2. Backup your instance

First things first, as this is a sensitive operation a backup of the instance must be performed to prevent any data loss. You can follow our backup process.

3. Prepare repositories

3.1. Upgrade the OS and other third party repositories

Prior to upgrading the system, ensure the OS as well as the third party repositories ar now targeting Debian 12. This can be easily done with sed:

sudo sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Please, take a moment with: cat /etc/apt/sources.list to ensure that there is not any bullseye left on this file. You should expect something like what’s shown below.

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 11.6.0 _Bullseye_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20221217-10:40]/ bookworm contrib main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 11.6.0 _Bullseye_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20221217-10:40]/ bookworm contrib main

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main contrib

# bookworm-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
# see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main contrib
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main contrib

4. Upgrade your system

Update the apt indexes :

sudo apt update

Upgrade Passbolt PRO :

sudo apt --only-upgrade install passbolt-pro-server

You can now upgrade your system :

# Upgrade first
sudo apt upgrade

# Then perform the dist-upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade

4.1. Ensure that you are running the correct distributions

In order to verify the distribution :

lsb_release -a

4.2. Ensure that you are running the correct PHP 8.2 version

To verify the PHP version :

php -v

5. Update passbolt nginx configuration

As php-fpm has been upgraded from 7.4 to 8.2, nginx configuration has to be updated accordingly.

It can easily be done with sed :

sudo sed -i 's/php7.4-fpm/php8.2-fpm/g' /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/nginx-passbolt.conf

Check if you have no configuration issue :

sudo nginx -t

It should return:

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

You can now safely restart the nginx web server and php-fpm:

sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl restart php8.2-fpm

6. Reboot your server

With Debian 12 comes a new Linux kernel, you must reboot your server.

7. Clean useless packages

Once the server rebooted on the new kernel, you can now remove useless packages:

sudo apt autoremove --purge
sudo apt autoclean

8. Troubleshooting

MariaDB went missing

It is possible your MariaDB instance has been uninstalled. You can install it back:

sudo apt install default-mysql-server