Turn on automatic apt-get updates and upgrades

Often times when I login to a VPS I get this a message like this:

32 packages can be updated.
11 updates are security updates.

I don’t want to type sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade all the time.

But sudo apt-get update is interactive by default so you have to hit enter or type y. So I did a little reseach on how to put apt-get in noninteractive mode and it’s quite simple. Just append -y (or --yes to it).

So when I want to auto upgrade my packages I can install a cronjob as root (sudo crontab -e) with this line in it:

20 4 * * * sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Which will update and upgrade my packages at 4:20 AM.

To log it to syslog:

20 4 * * * sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get --with-new-pkgs --yes upgrade 2>&1 | /usr/bin/logger -t UPDATEUPGRADE

To update new packages you can run --with-new-pkgs (it’s a little safer than dist-upgrade)

Read my other blog post on the logger function.

Happy coding! – Found a mistake or a typo? Please submit a PR to my GitHub-repo.