If I installed Mongo through apt-get, how do I update it?

Question

It seems like they gave me 1.4.4 Which is not the latest.

Is this normal? I want 1.6. But I'm afraid that if I do apt-get uninstall, bad things will happen.

Answer 1

Installing anything via apt-get installs whichever version is the default from all known repositories. By default that only includes your distributions repository (Debian, Ubuntu, ...).

Those repositories contain well-defined, well-tested versions of the software. They don't always get updated to the latest version (or may be somewhat slow).

If you require a specific version (or the latest one), then you need to find a repository that provides that version (possibly provided by the developers of the software) or install it via other means.

Answer 2

Frankly, this is a question about Debian packaging system. Anyway here it is my suggestion.

Make sure you have listed "unstable" in apt-get sources:

# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable.list 
deb ftp://<your closest debian mirror>/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://<your closest debian mirror>/debian/ unstable main

Find your mirror in the list of mirrors

Then do

apt-get update
apt-get install mongodb-server /unstable
apt-get install mongodb-clients /unstable

(be careful if it's your production -- MongoDB will be restarted)

And by the way, the latest version of MongoDB in Debian "unstable" is 1.6.5: MongoDB in "sid"

Answer 3

I'd recommend not to touch your distribution and operating system version, and go for the simple solution of installing a downloaded package: www.mongodb.org/downloads. Especially if you are using Debian, since Mongo 1.1.6 is supported only on unstable - packages.debian.org/search?keywords=mongodb

Tip: If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, check this page: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages

Answer 4

I'd recommend using the official Ubuntu and Debian packages ...

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages

That'll make sure you'll always get the latest stable version. If you use this on Ubuntu (for example) MongoDB will install to /var/lib/mongodb/ (instead of /data/db/)

So, if your data is already in /var/lib/mongodb/ you should be fine doing an uninstall and reinstall from the offical packages ... it shouldn't remove that dir unless it was a horible port in the first place!

Simply making a backup copy of that dir should do the trick if you are worried, good practice anyhow.

You can also always move your DB files into that dir after the install and MongoDB will pick them up (normally.)

Before you do anything however, just make sure you do a clean shutdown first! That way you won't end up with a mongod.lock file which won't let you do a restart w/o a repair.

$ ./mongo 
> use admin
> db.shutdownServer()