Automatic updates

It's of the utmost importance to keep your system up-to-date! Both for security, performances and maintenance reasons.

There are 2 ways to achieve automatic updates:

• On Ubuntu* distro you can use a dedicated package
• On Debian* distro you have to setup a cronjob

Ubuntu

Installation

apt-get install unattended-upgrades

Configuration (1) Packages to update

vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Now you have to choose which type of updates you'd like to have. Uncomment the *-updates:

Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
         "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-security";
         "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-updates";
//      "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-proposed";
//      "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-backports";
};

Configuration (2) Set the update frequency

vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

Put the following:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

References

Ubuntu official how-to: https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/automatic-updates.html