The unattended-upgrades package used on Debian is based on the one from Ubuntu. It is generally pretty safe in my opinion but I only ever enable it for security upgrades.
Installation
apt-get install unattended-upgrades apticron
unattended-upgrades handles the actual updates, apticron is used for emailing you of available updates - it is not required but I like it.
Configuring unattended-upgrades
Open up /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades and change it to the content below.
APT::Periodic::Enable "1";
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "**YOUR_EMAIL_HERE**";
// Automatically upgrade packages from these (origin, archive) pairs
Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
"${distro_id} stable";
"${distro_id} ${distro_codename}-security";
};
// Automatically reboot *WITHOUT CONFIRMATION* if a
// the file /var/run/reboot-required is found after the upgrade
Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "false";
So lets explain the above. As you can see we enable periodic updates, enable update package lists (triggers an apt-get update), enable autoclean to clean out the local package repository every 7 days, enable the actual unattended update and finally you can set your email address so that you will get an email when an update has happened. Next up we configure the origins to update from, as you can see we’ve only enabled security and as a very final step we make sure we’ve disabled automatic reboots - you probably don’t want your server randomly rebooting to update the running kernel, this means you will have to reboot when convenient after a kernel update.
Your unattended update will happen every day, triggered by cron.daily. Next time your cron.daily has triggered, look inside /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log, you should see something like this
2012-01-28 06:54:04,730 INFO Initial blacklisted packages:
2012-01-28 06:54:04,730 INFO Starting unattended upgrades script
2012-01-28 06:54:04,731 INFO Allowed origins are: ["('Debian','squeeze-security')"]
2012-01-28 06:54:05,952 INFO No packages found that can be upgraded unattended
If you installed apticron in the above step and want to configure it and use it then continue reading, if not then congratulations everything is done.
Configuring apticron
Open up /etc/apticron/apticron.conf, all you need to change is the EMAIL option.
EMAIL="**YOUR_EMAIL_HERE**"
Now each day you will receive an email when cron.daily runs with all available package updates.
