Upgrading Debian 8 “Jessie ” to Debian 9 “Stretch”

In this article, we will be upgrading Debian 8 “Jessie ” to Debian 9 “Stretch” by Linux command line. Method will work both, desktop and server systems. You might also want to read Debians “Whats new on Debian 9” article to make sure you really wanna do it. For example, in the update, Debian 9 will replace MySQL with MariaDB, there is more details about that and other stuff in this article.

Now we should get to work and go for the update. First we must upgrade our Debian 8 “Jessie” system to newest version. You can do this by typing the following commands as root. I will be using sudo, and will also write it incase you have sudo configured and just want to copy and paste the commands. If you don’t have it configured you can check out how to do it in this article.

Updating your “Jessie” system to newest version.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Once you have done that, without any broken packages or errors, you need to edit you sources list.

Open up /etc/apt/sources.list with your favorite text editor. You might also like to backup this file before editing, but I do not find it necessary.
Replace every “jessie” word with “stretch”

My file looks like this after editing, but do not replace your file with my contents unless you want to download your updates from Finland “lol”

Upgrading Debian 8 “Jessie ” to Debian 9 “Stretch”

Double check everything, that you don’t mess anything up or break your system.

The next phase is to update the repositories and upgrade the system with the commands following.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You have upgraded your system and hopefully without any errors.
You can check your current OS information with this command:
sudo cat /etc/os-release

Output should be something like this.

PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="9"
VERSION="9 (stretch)"
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"


Final words

I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, thanks for reading it. Also be sure to follow me on social medias so you can see everytime I post something new!

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