In this tutorial, we will show you how to convert CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, For those relying on CentOS 8 to enjoy the reliability and features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 but without the licensing costs, etc, that will end in 2021. At the end of 2021, CentOS 8 will no longer be maintained but CentOS 7 will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024. The CentOS Project will be focused moving forward just on CentOS Stream as the upstream/development branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step migrate your CentOS 8 Linux to CentOS Stream on CentOS 8.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS Linux.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Convert CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
sudo dnf clean all sudo dnf update
Step 2. Installing CentOS stream release.
Install the latest release of the CentOS Stream on your CentOS 8 Linux using the command:
sudo dnf install centos-release-stream
Step 3. Set CentOS Stream repo as the default.
Run the below command to swap the repository of our exiting Linux OS with the rolling release one which is the Stream:
sudo dnf swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos
Step 3. Synchronize installed packages to the latest versions.
Sync your existing distribution packages with the stream, that makes everything up to date, and all packages and their version will get synced to stream:
sudo dnf distro-sync
Once completed your CentOS 8 would be converted to CentOS Steam release 8. Check out the version of your OS to confirm the migration from 8 to stream has been done successfully:
$ cat /etc/os-release CentOS Stream release 8
Congratulations! You have successfully converted CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream. Thanks for using this tutorial to migrate your CentOS 8 Linux to CentOS Stream on CentOS 8 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official CentOS website.
