How to Update Your Raspberry Pi

Before performing any updates or upgrades, I recommend you back up your Pi. This way, if anything goes wrong during the update process, you can revert to an exact snapshot of the previous Pi state.

Back up your Pi in Windows or in MacOS.

Connect to the Raspberry Pi via SSH from your normal computer using the default username and password:

Username: pi
Password: raspberry

sudo apt-get update

This command will retrieve a list of all the installed packages and their latest versions.

sudo apt-get upgrade --yes

This command installs the packages. The yes flag will tell the update process to continue rather than prompting you for each updated package or library.

Alternatively, you can also chain these commands together with an &&:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade --yes

In this guide, I broke them out separately so that I could explain things more clearly.

When you're done, restart your Raspberry Pi with the following command:

sudo reboot

Pat yourself on the back. That was an easy one! Be sure to favorite or bookmark this guide so that you can keep your Pi up to date in the future!