Safely Updating and Upgrading a Production VPS Server with Backup Plan
I noticed there was upgradable packages on the VPS Server I run. Since this is the one hosting BookStack Publicly on my Website, I wanted to treat this with as much caution as possible.
I wanted to check what was upgradable:
app list --upgradable
I leveraged AI to take a look at the packages that were upgradable and get a better understanding for my approach:
| Category | Safe to Update? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
cloud-init |
✅ Yes | Handles initial cloud setup. Updating is safe and common. |
grub-efi-* |
⚠️ Yes, with caution | These are bootloader packages. Safe but be cautious on production VMs. A reboot is required after update. |
libldap-* |
✅ Yes | Core system libraries. These affect services using LDAP but are safe to upgrade. |
monarx-agent |
✅ Yes | This is a Hostinger security monitoring agent. Regularly updated. |
php8.1-* |
✅ Yes | You’re using a PPA (deb.sury.org) for PHP — updates are fine and likely beneficial. Restart PHP-FPM afterward. |
I decided that the quick reboot wouldn't take long and services on my site aren't in need of scheduling a time for a reboot so I went ahead and did this while keeping an eye on the Cardinals game. If this were a critical system with many users operating on it, I would schedule a time to do these upgrades and restart (After-Hours) or wait until a need.
I took a snapshot of my server before running the upgrades:
After the snapshot was complete, I went ahead with the update:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -yI Ticked the boxes to restart services (PHP, MySQL, Etc)
Then I used:
sudo rebootI waited for the server to come back online and made sure that php, mysql, was all up and running.
SUCCESS!!
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