Congratulations, you followed the excellent work put together by the fine folks at Ministry of Nodes, headed by @k3tan. You have a Bitcoin node running Bitcoin Core on Ubuntu. You have just heard the news that Bitcoin Core 26.1 has been released and you want to upgrade your node.
Here are the steps I took to upgrade from Bitcoin Core v26.0 to Bitcoin Core v26.1

Steps to Upgrade Your Bitcoin Core Node to v26.1 on Linux:

  1. Login via SSH to your bitcoin core node
    ssh user@node-ip
  2. Apply any operating system updates and reboot
    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo reboot
  3. Log back in to your bitcoin core node via SSH
    ssh user@node-ip
  4. Check your bitcoin version
    bitcoin-cli --version
  5. Go to your downloads directory
    cd ~/Downloads
  6. Download the release for your platform and wait for the file to finish downloading (Linux in my case)
    wget wget https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-26.1/bitcoin-26.1-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
  7. Download the list of cryptographic checksums: SHA256SUMS
    wget wget https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-26.1/SHA256SUMS
  8. Download the signatures attesting to validity of the checksums: SHA256SUMS.asc
    wget wget https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-26.1/SHA256SUMS.asc
  9. Verify that the checksum of the release file is listed in the checksums file
    sha256sum --ignore-missing --check SHA256SUMS
  10. Verify that the checksums file is PGP signed by a sufficient amount of keys you trust and have imported into your keychain
    gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc
  11. Extract the contents
    tar xvzf bitcoin-26.1-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
  12. Stop bitcoind service and wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes in some cases)
    sudo systemctl stop bitcoind
  13. Install the contents of the extracted bin subdirectory into the /usr/local/bin directory using the the install command
    sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root -t /usr/local/bin bitcoin-26.1/bin/*
  14. Start bitcoind service
    sudo systemctl start bitcoind
  15. Check your bitcoin version
    bitcoin-cli --version
"Bitcoin Core 26.1 is a maintenance release of the network’s predominant full node implementation. Its release notes describe several bug fixes." - Bitcoin Core v26.1 release notes
This is a great resource, thanks. I've followed Ketan's guide and am running my node now and noticed the updates to Core coming. Is this the same process to follow for updating other services on the node such as the Fulcrum server? I have to update this now also and have been wondering how to do it. Thanks.
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