Charlie Harvey

Setting up unattended upgrades on debian

Written by Charlie on

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There is fuller documentation of how to set up unattended upgrades on the debian wiki, but it is sometimes nice to have a super-compact "cheatsheet" for ones own reference. Others may have a use for it too.

First thing to do is to install the necessary unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges packages. You can also configure unattended upgrades once they install. As root do

aptitude install unattended-upgrades apt-listchanges && vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

You will want to enable the emails and I like to have unused dependencies removed as well.

Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "root"; Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencies "true";

Set up the periodic upgrade run, again as root.

dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

Then sort out the list changes config at /etc/apt/listchanges.conf.

[apt] frontend=pager email_address=root confirm=0 save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db which=both

That should be it done, check your email for upgrade runs.


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