I have a shell script to automatically configure new Ubuntu virtual machines for my purposes. I would like this script to install and enable unattended-upgrades, but I cannot figure out how to do so without user interaction.
The usual way to enable upgrades is dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades, but of course that is interactive. The noninteractive front end avoids asking any questions at all, and the text front end seems bound and determined to do its I/O with the tty and not with stdin/stdout.
5 Answers
Just make a copy of /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades after configuring it the way you like, and drop that into place on your target machine. You could embed it in your script, or you could rsync or wget it in from a server, or whatever.
So basically your script might do something like this:
apt-get install unattended-upgrades
wget -O /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
/etc/init.d/unattended-upgrades restartThere's really no reason to monkey with the dpkg-reconfigure script at all.
If you don't want to fetch the conf file from a remote server, it's VERY very short and simple - the default version, which fetches and installs security updates only, looks like this:
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";So you can just echo those lines into the config file directly with the following:
echo -e "APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists \"1\";\nAPT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade \"1\";\n" > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgradesIf you want to use dpkg-reconfigure, you can set the value with "debconf-set-selections", and then reconfigure it in a noninteractive way.
echo "unattended-upgrades unattended-upgrades/enable_auto_updates boolean true" | debconf-set-selections; dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive unattended-upgradesYou have to use sudo to echo into /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
if [[ ! -f /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades.bak ]]; then sudo cp /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades.bak sudo rm /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades echo "APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists \"1\"; APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages \"1\"; APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval \"30\"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade \"1\";" | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
fidpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive unattended-upgradesI would suggest to insert configuration parameters to configure unattended-upgrades.
sudo touch /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
echo "APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"" >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
echo "APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1" " >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgradesSame way you can configure/add parameters according to your requirement in conf file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades.
Don't forget to restart service to apply changes.
/etc/init.d/unattended-upgrades restart
