Upgrade from a previous release¶

Cuckoo Sandbox grows really fast and in every release new features are added and some others are fixed or removed. If not otherwise specified in the release documentation, the suggested way to upgrade your Cuckoo instance is to perform a fresh setup as described in Installation.

The following steps are suggested:

Backup your installation.
Read the documentation shipped with the new release.
Make sure to have installed all required dependencies, otherwise install them.
Do a Cuckoo fresh installation of the Host components.
Reconfigure Cuckoo as explained in this book (copying old configuration files is not safe because options can change between releases).
Test it!

If something goes wrong you probably failed some steps during the fresh installation or reconfiguration. Check again the procedure explained in this book.

It’s not recommended to rewrite an old Cuckoo installation with the latest release files, as it might raise some problems because:

You are overwriting Python source files (.py) but Pyhton bytecode files (.pyc) are still in place.
There are configuration files changes across the two versions, check our CHANGELOG file for added or removed configuration options.
The part of Cuckoo which runs inside guests may change.