Upgrading to the latest FreeBSD

Question

I have a server running FreeBSD 11.0.

I have full backups, and would like to update to the lastest 11.1 release.

How to do it?

Answer 1

To upgrade to FreeBSD 11.1, run as root:

freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.1-RELEASE

or

freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.1

The system may then show a few messages, concerning software installed, and ask

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? 

To which you usually answer y.

The procedure than fetches the "metadata" and applies the necessary patches.

At the end, according to the instructions shown, you run manually, again as root:

/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install

and then you are normally shown the message:

Installing updates...
Kernel updates have been installed.  Please reboot and run
"/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install" again to finish installing updates.

You then reboot, and as soon you have the system up, you login, and run again as root:

#/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
src component not installed, skipped
Installing updates... done.

Finally to check for the success of the operation:

$uname -r
11.1-RELEASE

After finishing the installation, you might want to run:

pkg update
pkg upgrade

To install the latest security updates.