How to migrate from Jenkins week Ubuntu package to LTS?

Question

I'm currently running the Jenkins weekly Ubuntu package from https://jenkins.io/download/ on Ubuntu 14.04. Specifically I'm on Jenkins 2.138 (the latest) from https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian/.

I'd like to migrate from the weekly to the more stable LTS release line. I'd like to wait until a new LTS release that's newer than our current weekly version (2.138) comes out, upgrade to that, and then stay on the LTS release line.

How can I orchestrate this migration without losing anything?

I wasn't able to find a Jenkins weekly → LTS migration guide for people who have Jenkins installed from the jenkins.io Debian/Ubuntu packages (they all seem to refer to the jenkins.war version).

We currently have deb http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian binary/ listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pkg_jenkins_ci_org_debian.list (pkg.jenkins-ci.org seems to be a mirror of pkg.jenkins.io). Would it be enough to simply edit that file, changing it to deb https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable binary/ (that is: changing the weekly apt URL to the stable/LTS one), and then run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade jenkins?

Answer 1

Your plan of action: changing the repository, and then running apt-get update will work assuming: the name of the package, jenkins is the same in both repositories. It shouldn't be hard to check this.

Other than that: I would make the following recommend the following

1. Make sure you make a backup of your server before starting this.
2. If you have a test server you can run a practice migration first, I would highly recommend it.

Alternative: You can use apt-mark hold jenkins to hold the jenkins package at some point, and it won't upgrade unless you unhold it apt-mark unhold jenkins. This way to you hold yourself on a 'stable' release until you are ready to upgrade.