Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 now that Cloudron v6 supports it... but why and how?

[d19dotca]

Hey guys,

Just thought i'd get the discussion going here, it's not quite a specific question but a few on the some topic. Thought this may be helpful to have a bit of a "mega-thread" on it or at least to start the discussion.

Context: Cloudron 6.x now supports Ubuntu 20.04 ("Focal"). Until now, the supported version was 18.04.

I'm very experienced in RHEL and CentOS, not much at all though in Ubuntu. In fact this is my only Ubuntu server and it's specifically deployed for Cloudron. Before Cloudron, I hadn't even really bothered to learn Ubuntu at all.

So I guess I have a few questions on the top of my mind. Some I think I know the answers and would appreciate some confirmation, and some I'm just out to lunch on. haha. Here goes...

1. When we update to Cloudron 6.x, is it considered "safe" to upgrade Ubuntu in-place, or does it require a new setup?
2. Is upgrading Ubuntu in-place even possible? If so, just a few commands to run I assume?
3. What are the actual benefits (I assume there are are a bunch) to upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04? And does it impact Cloudron in any way, i.e. have functionality that Cloudron can take advantage of and thus Cloudron is improved as a result of the Ubuntu platform update too - able to do something on 20.04 it couldn't do on 18.04? I'm not sure I understand all the benefits to upgrading Ubuntu just yet apart from possibly security items, and also how it may or may not impact Cloudron.
4. I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" here, but... upgrading Cloudron to v6 doesn't automatically update Ubuntu too, right?
5. Finally (I hope), I noticed there was a 20.04 and a 20.04.1... are both supported or specifically only 20.04?

I did find this for as a bit of a changelog for Ubuntu, but much of it I don't quite understand how it all fits in with Cloudron and stuff too, so not sure what parts to really care about or what parts to be concerned with, etc. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes

[jdaviescoates]

I believe @girish is writing a blog post on how to do the upgrade which I assume will answer a bunch of these questions

[girish]

@d19dotca said in Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 now that Cloudron v6 supports it... but why and how?:

The top level answer is yes, after updating to Cloudron 6, existing installations can update from Ubuntu 18 to 20. Some manual steps are required and just doing dist-upgrade is not enough. MySQL for example has upgraded to v8 in Ubuntu 20. For those on Ubuntu 16, you have to first upgrade to 18 and then to 20. For the moment, till we make a blog post on how to upgrade to Ubuntu 20, please don't dist-upgrade! It won't work.

When we update to Cloudron 6.x, is it considered "safe" to upgrade Ubuntu in-place, or does it require a new setup?

Generally, in-place update is safe and Canonical has put a lot of work to make this easy but it's not 100% safe and there is a small chance things can go wrong. If things go wrong, you have to basically install Cloudron 6 on Ubuntu 20 and you can restore from latest backup there.

Is upgrading Ubuntu in-place even possible? If so, just a few commands to run I assume?

Yes, just a few commands and you have to sit next on the ssh session when it's upgrading. Since it keeps asking many questions about how to update packages.

What are the actual benefits (I assume there are are a bunch) to upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04? And does it impact Cloudron in any way, i.e. have functionality that Cloudron can take advantage of and thus Cloudron is improved as a result of the Ubuntu platform update too - able to do something on 20.04 it couldn't do on 18.04? I'm not sure I understand all the benefits to upgrading Ubuntu just yet apart from possibly security items, and also how it may or may not impact Cloudron.

There is no tangible benefit other than feeling good that you are on Ubuntu 20 Canonical will support ubuntu 18 well into 2023, so there is no real reason to upgrade.

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" here, but... upgrading Cloudron to v6 doesn't automatically update Ubuntu too, right?

Correct, Cloudron won't automatically update ubuntu.

Finally (I hope), I noticed there was a 20.04 and a 20.04.1... are both supported or specifically only 20.04?

Right, so .1, .2 etc are just the same release train. They just contain many updated packages and iirc all libraries have binary compatible as well within the same release (so, no new api/features, just bug fixes). In general, as a VPS user, you may not even have a choice here. You just use what your VPS gives you (and then you do apt update to get the latest release).

Finally, I want to emphasize this again - there is no real benefit of updating to Ubuntu 20 (for Cloudron). There is no extra features or more stability, it's all exactly the same. Cloudron will continue to support Ubuntu 16,18,20 for the foreseeable future. We have minimal dependancy on ubuntu version because we deploy everything in containers and other things are deployed from upstream repos like (node, nginx, docker etc) and we don't use Ubuntu packages since they are quite old. The main reason we added support for Ubuntu 20 is because in all the VPS providers, the default ubuntu has become Ubuntu 20. So, people click away and try to install and fail and this leads to support tickets.

[d19dotca]

@girish Ah fantastic - thank you as always for the detailed response!

[marcusquinn]

Long and rocky experience tells me with operating systems to stay a year behind.

Especially when security patches are normally supported for 5 years and optimisations are usually all in the apps and service version updates within.

Let others do the OS battle-testing for a year or play with it for non-critical systems, but life's too short to be on the bleeding edge in production.