Debian – 100% Non-Interactive Dist-Upgrade

aptdebianlinux

Is there a way to do an apt-get dist-upgrade in Debian that not only automatically answers "yes" to all questions asked, but also uses reasonable defaults as answers to questions that are sophisticated enough to require various interactive dialog boxes to pop up? I'm thinking here of the keymap stuff that shows up when you upgrade libc6, and kernel image choices.

The goal is to be able to remotely initiate a rather large dist-upgrade – even for a machine that is severely behind the times – and not have to babysit it at all, unless something is just horribly, disastrously wrong.

Surely this is possible?

Thanks in advance!

Best Answer

If you set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive (to stop debconf prompts from appearing) and add force-confold and force-confdef to your /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg file, you should have a completely noninteractive package installation experience. Any package that still prompts you for information has a release critical bug (and I say that as both an automation junkie and as a Debian developer).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Clarifying Debian Dist-Upgrade Process

The command apt-get upgrade will not add or remove packages. apt-get dist-upgrade will add or remove packages as required.

The command apt-get dist-upgrade will not automatically upgrade you from one release to another unless you have also updated your sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) to point at a newer release.

man apt-get

upgrade
    upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages 
    currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated 
    in /etc/apt/sources.list.

dist-upgrade
    dist-upgrade, in addition to performing the function of upgrade, 
    also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions 
    of packages;

Are there special concerns to be aware of when doing a dist-upgrade vs upgrade?

For the most part I always apt-get dist-upgrade to apply updates to a system. Of course pay attention to exactly what new packages are being added or removed. Frequently this happens when something is being added like a newer kernel that isn't compatible with the previous and you will have to recompile modules. If you have some kernel module you had to build on your own, then you may need to make sure you recompile it for the new kernel. I have a couple systems with network interfaces not supported by the stock kernel that I have to recompile the network driver after each kernel update.

Ubuntu – How to Skip Interactive Post-Install Configuration Steps in APT-GET

You can do a couple of things for avoiding this. Setting the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable to noninteractive and using -y flag. For example:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt-get -yq install [packagename]

If you need to install it via sudo, use:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -yq install [packagename]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Clarifying Debian Dist-Upgrade Process

Ubuntu – How to Skip Interactive Post-Install Configuration Steps in APT-GET

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