JxTx

Installing a Specific Version With apt

Posted on

I went to upgrade my home Gitlab server with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y and was met with the following error.

  Preparing to unpack .../gitlab-ce_16.6.0-ce.0_armhf.deb ...
  gitlab preinstall: It seems you are upgrading from 16.2 to 16.6.
  gitlab preinstall: It is required to upgrade to the latest 16.3.x version first before proceeding.
  gitlab preinstall: Please follow the upgrade documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/index.html#upgrade-paths
  dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/gitlab-ce_16.6.0-ce.0_armhf.deb (--unpack):
   new gitlab-ce package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   /var/cache/apt/archives/gitlab-ce_16.6.0-ce.0_armhf.deb
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

This could be me being a poor home sysadmin, because I'm a few versions out, and the most recent package from the repo's (16.6) requires me to be on a 16.3 release.

I'd be lying if I'd say that I've never came across this before on this server, but last time it was a mad dash to upgrade it and I could not remember what it was I did to fix it. So this time I'm going to document it.

apt install $old_release

I remember coming across this in the debian administrators handbook, but I never really needed to use it. Basically you can install a specific version of the application to install by adding =$VERSION to the end of the package name. To quote from the apt man page.

A specific version of a package can be selected for installation by following the package name with an equals (=) and the version of the package to select. Alternatively the version from a specific release can be selected by following the package name with a forward slash (/) and codename (bookworm, trixie, sid …) or suite name (stable, testing, unstable).

So to fix my problem I had to run the following.

  sudo apt install gitlab-ce=16.3.0-ce.0 && \
      sudo apt update && \
      sudo apt upgrade -y

This would first upgrade to a 16.3 release before then upgrading to the latest version.