Debian/Plesk: Upgrading Debian 10 to Debian 11

Debian/Plesk: Upgrading Debian 10 to Debian 11

The instructions on the Plesk page simply do not work and the process is far too complicated. The whole procedure can be done more easily with the following steps:

  1. Create a backup of the server e.g. with a snapshot
  2. Use Plesk backup feature and create a full server backup using a Plesk backup password on (of course) a remote FTPS storage
  3. Remove Plesk completely
  4. Perform upgrade
  5. Reinstall Plesk
  6. Import backup

I assume that you can already perform steps 1 and 2 to remove Plesk we run the command

plesk installer --remove-everything
rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plesk*.list
plesk installer --remove-everything

off. In fact, the removal command sometimes needs to be run multiple times.

apt-get autoremove
nano /etc/apt/sources.list

In the apt-sources list we comment out all the old entries and add below:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free

After that we run

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade --without-new-pkgs
#Scroll down and press q
#Cron: OK
#PAM: Yes
#MariaDB: Y
#Cloud: N
apt-get full-upgrade
#scroll down and press q
#ssh cron OK
#syslog Y
#openssh KEEP
apt-get autoremove
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

and restart the server for safety:

reboot

After that we install Plesk again

wget https://autoinstall.plesk.com/plesk-installer && chmod +x ./plesk-installer && ./plesk-installer
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

and restore our backups. This completes the upgrade and everything should work without having to resolve numerous compatibility issues.

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