Automating apt update && apt upgrade for security updates
In order to avoid being prompted for upgrades in the middle of a task, I would like apt to automatically download and apply security upgrades. It seems that the usual way to do that is to activate unattended-upgrades. So I ran dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades and now have the following content in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades:
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
There is also a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic file with:
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "0";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
This should mean that unattended-upgrades is set to check for security updates, download and apply them periodically (as defined in Software & Updates). However, the list of available updates that show up when I run apt update keeps growing. Is there any further setting to modify in order to get them automatically installed?
The unattended-upgrades.log file has several lines of the following:
"WARNING Not running on this development release before 2029-05-09"
Is Ecne the current development release?
In Triskel I use software-properties-qt . There are similar programs in the other graphic environment as you can see in the Automatic Updates section of the manual. Sorry I'd explain more, but I am forbidden.
Yes, this is Software & Updates (software-properties-gtk on MATE).
There you can choose to have security updates automatically downloaded and installed daily, but as things stand it is not happening on my system and security updates are piling on without being managed. I thought unattended-upgrades could help, but for now I keep getting the above warning.
At some point I will run apt upgrade manually, but there has to be a way to get that done automatically.
After running apt upgrade manually, a debug dry run of unattended-upgrades now returns "DEBUG Running on the development release" followed by what looks like the expected output of the automatic update script. So some lock has been unlocked somewhere, and hopefully automatic security upgrades will roll on.