Upgrading FreeBSD to the newest release

Apr 18, 2021

I swear I’ve written this before, but I couldn’t find it. So here we go, “another” post on how to update your major RELEASE version of FreeBSD.

Here are my commands to upgrade from FreeBSD 12 to 13, this should also work for other major versions:

First confirm your FreeBSD instance is up to date

freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
pkg upgrade

This will verify and install any outstanding patches.

At this writing it was 13.0-RELEASE.

freebsd-update -r 13.0-RELEASE upgrade

You will see a bunch of patches and other things being updated. Most likely you’ll say Y to everything.

After everything is patched, run the following commands to “commit” the changes:

freebsd-update install

After this is done, run the reboot command, and you’ll be in the newest release.

Now that you are running the newest release, you need to pull/update your packages and clean up your system.

freebsd-update install # yes again

This will clean up any non-needed files from your previous update.

Now we need to upgrade your packages:

pkg-static install -f pkg
pkg bootstrap -f
pkg update
pkg upgrade

This will force an update of your pkg package and get everything into a state ready to be upgraded.

Run the following command one last time, and then after it’s complete you’re done!

freebsd-update install

#blogpost