Blog
Follow ServerPilot on Twitter

Announcing Support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

April 23, 2020

We're happy to announce immediate support for Ubuntu 20.04 ("Focal Fossa"). This latest Ubuntu Long Term Support version was released today.

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution used for running web servers. Ubuntu does a Long-Term Support (LTS) release every two years. Ubuntu LTS releases are enterprise-grade and receive security updates from Ubuntu for five years. For 20.04, that means security updates through 2023.

As with previous Ubuntu LTS releases, we began preparing ServerPilot for compatibility months in advance. This early development and testing makes it possible for us to launch immediate support.

You can begin installing on Ubuntu 20.04 as soon as your server provider makes Ubuntu 20.04 images available. DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud released Ubuntu 20.04 images today. We expect other server providers such as Linode, Vultr, and UpCloud to release Ubuntu 20.04 images soon.

The biggest change in Ubuntu 20.04 is the availability of MySQL 8, the latest MySQL version and the first major release since MySQL 5.7. WordPress and most other PHP applications are already fully compatible with MySQL 8. If you have legacy applications that require MySQL 5.7, you can continue to install ServerPilot on Ubuntu 18.04 servers.

Notable new features in MySQL 8 include:

  • Performance improvements for read/write workloads
  • Internal MySQL metadata is now crash-safe using InnoDB
  • Additional types of indexes
  • New regular expression functions
  • Improvements to error logging and performance schema
  • Extended JSON syntax and JSON table functions

See the detailed list of new features in MySQL 8.

As with other Ubuntu versions, ServerPilot provides our own PHP, Nginx, and Apache packages so our users always have the latest versions.

If you have a server running Ubuntu 18.04, you don't need to upgrade it. Ubuntu 18.04 will continue to receive security updates and bug fixes until 2023.

If you need features of MySQL 8, we strongly suggest creating a new server and migrating your apps to the new servers. Otherwise, if you must upgrade, you can follow our instructions on how to upgrade Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.

Learn more about ServerPilot's support for Ubuntu LTS.