This article only shows how to do upgrades across releases. It is fairly straight forward, though like any OS, doing a major upgrade of this type requires patience, especially as with FreeBSD the entire ports and binary libraries are upgraded also.
For now, a simple block of code followed by some references
# NOTE: this is NOT a bash script. For one thing, sh is used for BSD # and for another, there are several places where you have to provide input # get latest release info freebsd-update fetch freebsd-update install # download upgrade files. Change the 10.3-RELEASE to # whatever release you are upgrading to. freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.3-RELEASE # do the initial upgrade freebsd-update install # reboot shutdown -r now # update everything else freebsd-update install shutdown -r now # upgrade ports structure portsnap fetch portsnap extract portsnap fetch update # upgrade pkg (binary) packages pkg clean pkg update pkg upgrade