Migrating from CentOS 7
Verifying SELinux State
Running leapp
will set SELinux to permissive
mode during the upgrade in order to carry it out. This should not be an issue for most users. Nevertheless, if you had SELinux enabled in CentOS 7, you might want to have it enabled in AlmaLinux 8. You can check the current SELinux state with the following command:
$ getenforce
If the output of the above command is Enforcing, SELinux is enabled and there is nothing left to do. If not, you can set SELinux to enforcing
mode by editing /etc/selinux/config
and setting the variable SELINUX
within the config file to enforcing
. You then need to reboot your system for the configuration to take effect.
Conclusion
As CentOS's end of life draws near, you are going to need a migration plan for moving forward. ELevate helps you migrate from CentOS to AlmaLinux, or another RHEL-compatible distribution, with relative ease. During testing, I discovered that ELevate could reliably upgrade a CentOS 7 machine, which hosted a Dockerized web application and some EPEL services, using nothing but the steps described in this article (Figure 5).

Your new AlmaLinux 8 install should be able to serve you well until 2029, when it reaches end of life. However, you can upgrade before then using ELevate to move forward to AlmaLinux 9 immediately, which will give you a distribution supported until 2032.
As a community-driven Linux OS, AlmaLinux welcomes contributions to the ELevate project. For more information, see the "Get Involved" box [7].
Get Involved
If you'd like to contribute to ELevate, AlmaLinux has launched the Package Evolution Service (PES). PES collects bug reports and issues from users as well as supplies information on migrating from one RHEL-compatible distribution to another. For more information on how to contribute to PES, see the ELevate Contribution Guide [7].
This article was made possible by support from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation through Linux New Media's Topic Subsidy Program (https://www.linuxnewmedia.com/Topic_Subsidy).
Infos
- CentOS Stream in production use: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/centos-stream-checklist
- AlmaLinux: https://almalinux.org
- ELevate: https://almalinux.org/elevate/
- Red Hat Leapp: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/leapp-explained-detail
- EPEL support: https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-01-31-elevate-updates/
- ELevate Frequent Issues: https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevate-frequent-issues.html#leapp-upgrade-error-caused-by-important-modules-from-kernel-drivers
- ELevate Contribution Guide: https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/Contribution-guide.html
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