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:
- Login via SSH to your bitcoin core node
ssh user@node-ip
- Apply any operating system updates and reboot
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo reboot
- Log back in to your bitcoin core node via SSH
ssh user@node-ip
- Check your bitcoin version
bitcoin-cli --version
- Go to your downloads directory
cd ~/Downloads
- 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
- Download the list of cryptographic checksums: SHA256SUMS
wget wget https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-26.1/SHA256SUMS
- Download the signatures attesting to validity of the checksums: SHA256SUMS.asc
wget wget https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-26.1/SHA256SUMS.asc
- Verify that the checksum of the release file is listed in the checksums file
sha256sum --ignore-missing --check SHA256SUMS
- 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
- Extract the contents
tar xvzf bitcoin-26.1-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
- Stop bitcoind service and wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes in some cases)
sudo systemctl stop bitcoind
- 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/*
- Start bitcoind service
sudo systemctl start bitcoind
- 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