Debian dist-upgrade does not upgrade to anything higher than 8.11

Question

I have a Debian 8.11 server and I'd like to upgrade it to Debian 9 first and to Debian 10 afterwards.

I did the following:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

All finished with no errors and if I repeat the commands above they say that there are 0 packages to be upgraded. Thus I assume that it went well.

Nonetheless, my system is still 8.11:

$ cat /etc/debian_version
8.11

$ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="8"
VERSION="8 (jessie)"
ID=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

What can be the problem? I was trying to follow Upgrades from Debian 8 (jessie)

Answer 1

You need to update your “sources” so that they refer to stretch rather than jessie:

sudo sed -i s/jessie/stretch/ /etc/apt/sources.list

Once that’s done,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

will upgrade to Debian 9.

After rebooting, you can repeat the process, replacing stretch with buster to upgrade to Debian 10.