Edited: Never mind on the php upgrade - I was able to find instructions and upgrade successfully to php 5.6.17 at https://www.dotdeb.org/instructions/  Also found your documentation to upgrade the appliance. May leave that for another day. Thank you.

I currently have php5.4.45 installed on our Turnkey Wordpress server. I need to upgrade php to php 5.6 for security issues. When I run apt-get update then apt-get install php5 it installs the same version I already have installed, it does not update it to php5.6. Is there a technique I do not know to get version 5.6 installed? We are using turnkey-wordpress 13.0 wheezy amd64.

I just saw that you have a new turnkey wordpress 14.0 Is it a difficult procedure to upgrade from our 13.0 to the 14.0?

Thank you.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

As a general rule, you don't need to "upgrade" to a newer version to get security patches. That's part of the beauty of TurnKey. The security vulnerabilities have backported patches developed (by the Debian security team) and TurnKey auto-installs them (when they are available) every night.

Installing from dotdeb means that you lose the auto security updates (and will now have to manually check and install updates to resolve security issues).

Also it may cause issues in the future. It's probably very unlikely with WordPress; but some PHP apps are really fussy about the PHP version that they run on. Trying to use them on a newer version than they were built for can sometimes cause strange issues. By using the same PHP version (but with backported security patches) you get the best of both worlds; security and rock solid stability...

As you may have already read; the best way to upgrade between TurnKey versions is to actually migrate your data to a newer server using TKLBAM (the M is for migration). The beauty of doing it that way is that you don't ever risk your data. You can keep the original site running until you can confirm 100% that everything is as it should be on your new server before you make that your primary server. TKLBAM is also for backups (the B is for backup).

Jeremy Davis's picture

So if you are running an older version of TurnKey I suggest that you migrate your data to the current build. There is a doc page which details a suggested data migration workflow and some specific considerations. It's not exhaustive so depending on the appliance you are using you may still need to make some other adjustments, but it's a good starting point.

There are other options too such as doing an OS level upgrade. Although IMO using TKLBAM to migrate the data is the superior option as your existing production site can remain untouched until you have got everything working flawlessly on your new server.

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