Linux Administration Cookbook

Debian

In the Debian (and Ubuntu) world, we use a package called unattended-upgrades. It's been around for quite a while, and is usually the option people go with for automatically updating their Debian-based distributions.

Jump into your stretch box and run a quick install of the package, as follows:

$ sudo apt install unattended-upgrades

If you now ls the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ directory, you will see a couple of new files:

$ ls -l /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/total 44-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   49 Jul 17 01:48 00aptitude-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   82 Jul 17 01:46 00CDMountPoint-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   40 Jul 17 01:46 00trustcdrom-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  769 Sep 13  2017 01autoremove-r--r--r-- 1 root root 1768 Jul 17 01:49 01autoremove-kernels-rw-r--r-- 1 root root ...