Unattended Upgrades Debian - Ubuntu

The purpose

The purpose of unattended-upgrades is to keep the computer current with the latest security (and other) updates automatically.

If you plan to use it, you should have some means to monitor your systems, such as installing the apt-listchanges package and configuring it to send you emails about updates. And there is always /var/log/dpkg.log, or the files in /var/log/unattended-upgrades/.

As of Debian 9 (Stretch) both the unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges packages are installed by default and upgrades are enabled with the GNOME desktop. Rudimentary configuration is accessible via the "Software & Updates" application (software-properties-gtk).

In Debian 12 (Bookworm) unattended-upgrades is no longer a default install with Gnome. Download and upgrade schedules are set up by Packagekit using systemd timers on installation. The default behaviour in Gnome for upgrades detected via APT is now to advise of availability, and not to install by default.

To install these packages, run the following command as root:

apt-get install -y unattended-upgrades apt-listchanges