Ubuntu 22.04 LTS leaves standard support at the end of April 2027. If your Laravel Forge servers run 22.04, the next few months are the time to plan their replacement, because there is no button to upgrade them.
What "end of standard support" means
Ubuntu LTS releases get five years of standard support: regular security updates for the core system. After that, security fixes only continue through Canonical's paid Ubuntu Pro subscription.
For a server that runs client sites, that leaves two choices:
- Pay for extended support and keep the server as it is.
- Move the sites to a new server on Ubuntu 26.04, which is supported until April 2031.
Most agencies choose the second: it also brings newer PHP and database versions, and a fresh server without years of manual changes.
Why Forge can't just upgrade the server
Forge sets a server's Ubuntu version when it creates the server. It doesn't run distribution upgrades on an existing one, and running do-release-upgrade yourself on a Forge-managed server is risky: PHP, nginx, MySQL and Forge's own configuration can all change underneath your sites.
So upgrading Ubuntu on Forge really means creating a new server and moving every site to it.
How much work it is
For each site on the old server, a manual move means:
- Creating the site on the new server, with its domains, aliases and SSL.
- Copying the
.env, deploy script, nginx rules and PHP settings. - Creating the database and copying its data.
- Copying anything that isn't in Git: uploads, Statamic content, form submissions.
- Recreating cron jobs and queue workers, with paths updated.
- Carrying over firewall rules.
- Deploying, testing, then switching traffic.
None of it is hard, but it adds up to an afternoon or more per server, and it's easy to miss one cron job or one upload folder. Our migration checklist covers every item.
Plan your switch-over
The safest order is to build and test everything on the new server while the old one keeps serving traffic:
- Build the new server and recreate every site on it.
- Copy databases and files across, then deploy and test each site on the new server.
- Switch over: put the old sites into maintenance, copy the latest data one more time, move cron jobs and workers, and point traffic at the new server.
If the server has a DigitalOcean reserved IP, moving that IP switches every site at once, in seconds, with no DNS changes. Without one, you update DNS for each domain, so lower its TTL a day or two beforehand.
Check your servers now
Make a list of every server still on 22.04, and the PHP and MySQL versions on each. Anything on PHP 8.1 or earlier, or MySQL 8.0 or earlier, is already past its own end of life, and the move is a good time to fix that too.
Kiln does this for you. Connect Forge and the Servers page lists every server's Ubuntu, PHP and database version with its support end date. Kiln then moves a whole server, every site at once, with zero downtime, for £15 a server.