In 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS 8 will no longer be supported after the end of 2021 and will be replaced by CentOS Stream.
After this announcement, a number of new projects have been started with the aim of developing a successor to CentOS. Two projects emerged as the largest: AlmaLinux (developed by CloudLinux) and Rocky Linux (developed by the original developers of CentOS, among others). At the time of writing, both cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin support AlmaLinux.
AlmaLinux has released a handy migration tool that allows you to migrate your CentOS 8 installation to AlmaLinux without reinstalling your VPS.We therefore recommend that you upgrade your CentOS 8 VPS (with or without control panel) to AlmaLinux via the steps below.
Execute the steps in this guide as root user, or as a user with root permissions.
Step 1
Connect to your VPS using SSH or the VPS console in the TransIP control panel.
Step 2
Create a snapshot of your VPS so that in case of problems during the upgrade you can fall back to your earlier configuration.
Step 3
Download the AlmaLinux migration script:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy/master/almalinux-deploy.sh
Step 4
Execute the script:
bash almalinux-deploy.sh
Step 5
If the installation went well, you'll see the following notification:
Migration to AlmaLinux is completed
Finally, verify your newly updated operating system using the commands:
cat /etc/redhat-release
grubby --info DEFAULT | grep AlmaLinuxIf all went well, you'll see AlmaLinux in the results of both commands.
This concludes our tutorial on upgrading CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux.
Should you have any questions left regarding this article, do not hesitate to contact our support department. You can reach them via the ‘Contact Us’ button at the bottom of this page.