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I have a digital ocean VPS and I'm trying to install WKHTMLTOPDF using apt-get, but apparently my Ubuntu version (12.10) is out of date. I've tried the following:

apt-get, apt-get upgrade, apt-get update

None of those work anymore. From what I'm reading, the files no longer exist / are moved after certain amount of time passes from when that distro was released.

I'm reading that its possible to do:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

But this is a production server and I'm kind of scared that it will run into some error and then the app could go down.

Is there any other way I can get wkhtmltopdf running on this linux distro? There seems to be one .deb file on the wkhtmltopdf site for 12.04, and all the stuff I'm googling seems to be for 12.04 (nothing on 12.10)

And furthermore, is upgrading my distro something I want to do anyway for security reasons? Or can I somehow get away with installing wkhtmltopdf without upgrading and keep my production server intact / not take any risks / not deal with the hastle of upgrading?

Greg Blass
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12.10 was not an LTS (Long Term Support) release, so support for it lasts only 6 months. This is in contrast to the LTS releases (12.04 and 14.04 for example) for which the support lasts 2 years. This is the reason you may not find packages built for your version of Ubuntu now, and you find them for 12.04. The deb package for 12.04 would possibly work for 12.10 though - you can try that out. One case I can think of where it wouldn't work is if it has dependencies on specific versions of other packages which are different in 12.10.

And furthermore, is upgrading my distro something I want to do anyway for security reasons?

IMO you should, and you should upgrade to 14.04. Recall that Canonical have probably not pushed out any security updates for 12.10 since April 2013. In general, it would be very advisable to use an LTS release for your production servers, since you will get security and other updates for them for at least 2 years.

Hariharan Iyer
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  • Thanks for the info. So is it likely that I'll run into trouble running sudo apt-get dist-upgrade? Do I basically need to rebuild the production server on a new droplet (VPS)? Or should that command generally do the trick and keep my existing server intact? – Greg Blass Aug 21 '14 at 03:30
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    To upgrade to a new release, you need to use the `do-release-upgrade` command and not `apt-get dist-upgrade`. It is generally safe - I've done it lots of times though not such a big jump. However I would imagine it's a heavy operation in terms of network, CPU and disk usage - especially since you're doing such a big upgrade - and this might affect the performance of your production server when responding to customer traffic. And of course, as with all software, there is the possibility of something going wrong :-). I would recommend rebuilding the server instead of upgrading in-place. – Hariharan Iyer Aug 21 '14 at 04:03
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    Correction to my previous comment - you can use `dist-upgrade` for LTS releases. – Hariharan Iyer Aug 21 '14 at 04:09