How to upgrade Julia to a new release?

How to upgrade Julia:

Windows & MacOS & Linux

The most trivial way of upgrading Julia is to go to the download page and manually install corresponding binaries. (UPDATE: if you're on old Julia, e.g. v0.6)If you're going to upgrade Julia to a new minor version(e.g. v0.5=>v0.6), you could easily reinstall your old packages by the following steps(Julia-v1.0 shipped with the new package manager, so there is no such hassle):

julia> using Pkg # Pkg.init() if needed
copy REQUIRE file from package directory of the old version to the new one (in this example from .julia/v0.5 to .julia/v0.6) overwriting the existing file
julia> Pkg.resolve() # or Pkg.update()

MacOS

If you're using Homebrew and homebrew-julia, please follow the instructions here.

Linux

Use abelsiqueira's installer jill.

To OP's Question

1.Pkg.update() is used for updating Julia's packages, not Julia itself, so downloading the prebuild version and reinstalling seems to be the only way to upgrade Julia for now. Or you could build Julia from source following the instructions here.

2.The release notes are listed here:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/HISTORY.md
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/NEWS.md

2022 version

Just wanted to share what I tried to update Julia on my windows and it worked just fine.

I added UpdateJulia package and using that (using UpdateJulia) I updated the Julia version on my PC by update_julia():

Open Julia Package manager and type in the following commands one by one,

]add UpdateJulia
using UpdateJulia
update_julia()

Remember: simply typing ] will bring you to pkg mode in REPL, and by delete (mac) or backspace (windows) you get out of it.

How to upgrade Julia to a new release?