I decided to upgrade my site to the new version of Ubuntu as I haven’t done that for a couple of years. It is always a nice thing to work on when I am on vacation as it is the sort of thing that I don’t really get around to normally when I am busy. What a pain that ended up being.

The Upgrade for the OS itself went very smoothly as it seems to normally do so for Ubuntu. But the upgrade to the newer version of PHP broke everything with my site. As I think back actually I think this happened last time when I went from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 as well and it jumped from php5 to php7. I ended up with about a 3 hour outage trying to sort everything out.

The Upgrade Process

I finally got around to upgrading my web server from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04.1. I decided to jot down my experiences in case anyone else runs into these issues.

Preparation

The first thing I did prior to doing the upgrade was to run updraft plus to backup the Blog’s database and files. After that finished I logged into the Amazon EC2 console and created an image of my AMI. This way in the worst case scenario that I trashed my image I could just boot the backup image and be where I was before I began.