How to enable automatic system updates in ubuntu

Automatic updates for Ubuntu Linux

1. Update the server, run:
   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
2. Install unattended upgrades on Ubuntu. Type the following apt command sudo apt install unattended-upgrades apt-listchanges bsd-mailx
   
3. Turn on unattended security updates, run:
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades
   
4. Configure automatic updates, enter:
   sudo vi /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
   Set up alert email ID:
   Unattended-Upgrade::Mail “[email protected]”;
   Automatically reboot Ubuntu box WITHOUT CONFIRMATION for kernel updates:
   Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot “true”;
   Finally edit the /etc/apt/listchanges.conf and set email ID:
   [email protected]
   Save and close the file.
5. Verify that it is working by running the following command:
   sudo unattended-upgrades –dry-run
   

Ubuntu automatic updates sample email alert

Configuring Unattended-Upgrade::Mail in 50unattended-upgrades file enables unattended-upgrades to email a sysadmin detailing any packages that need upgrading or have problems. The Ubuntu server sent an update report via email as follows:

See automatic updates logs

Now that you set up automatic updates on Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS. It is time to see logs. Hence, use the grep command or cat command or more command/egrep command:
sudo cat /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log
sudo tail -f /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log
sudo grep ‘linux-image’ /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log
And you are done. I hope this helps you to keep the server or virtual machine running in cloud current with the latest security updates automatically.

Conclusion

You learned how to configure automatic unattended updates for your Ubuntu Linux based server up-to-date. It is a simple and easiest way to protect your server from vulnerabilities. This method is also beneficial when you administrate multiple servers. Manually updating the system and applying patches can be a very time-consuming process. However, for a large number of servers/VMs, I would recommend something like Ansible.

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🐧 2 comments so far. add one ↓

Last updated September 15, 2015 By Abhishek Prakash 4 Comments

Before seeing how to enable automatic system updates in Ubuntu, first let’s see why should we do it in the first place.

By default Ubuntu checks for updates daily. When there are security updates, it shows immediately but for other updates (i.e. regular software updates) it pop ups once a week. So, if you have been using Ubuntu for a while, this may be a familiar sight for you:

Now if you are a normal desktop user, you don’t really care about what kind of updates are these. And this is not entirely a bad thing. You trust Ubuntu to provide you good updates, right? So, you just select ‘Install Now’ most of the time, don’t you?

And all you do is to click on Install Now, why not enable the automatic system updates? Enabling automatic system updates means all the latest updates will be automatically downloaded and installed without requiring any actions from you. Isn’t it convenient?

Enable automatic updates in Ubuntu

I am using Ubuntu 15.04 in this tutorial but the steps are the same for Ubuntu 14.04 as well.

Go to Unity Dash and look for Software & Updates:

This will open the Software sources settings for you. Click on Updates tab here:

In here, you’ll see the default settings which is daily check for updates and immediate notification for security updates.

All you need to do is to change the action which reads “When there are” to “Download and install automatically”. This will download all the available updates and install them automatically.

That’s it. Close it and you have automatic updates enabled in Ubuntu. In fact this tutorial is pretty similar to changing update notification frequency in Ubuntu.

Do you use automatic updates installation or you prefer to install them manually?

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