Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a web server running Ubuntu Server 8.04 and I would like to know the proper commands to keep it updated.

I’ve been using apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, but occasionally it tells me that there are packages held back. I’ve been using apt-get dist-upgrade to get the rest of those held back packages. Is that the best way to handle it? I don’t want to upgrade to 8.10 or anything later until 10.04 LTS comes out.

share|improve this question
Has anything changed since 8.04? I’m using 12.04 now. –  Corey May 7 '13 at 17:31

5 Answers 5

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Update: per sparks' comment, I should note that 'aptitude' can be used in place of 'apt-get' in my answer below, with one exception: 'apt-get upgrade' would be replaced by 'aptitude safe-upgrade'. The aptitude front-end to APT has some nice features compared to apt-get, as outlined in this blog post. However, if you've already got a system that you've been managing with apt-get, you can certainly continue using apt-get, and probably should. We don't do a lot of software installation / uninstallation on a server, so I don't find the use of aptitude to be of critical importance, but if I was to fire up a brand new server today I would probably use it.

The latest Ubuntu Server documentation still details using apt-get, and only discusses aptitude as a graphical front end to APT. While this is certainly an oversight, it certainly does imply that there's nothing wrong with using apt-get.

I use Ubuntu's unattended-upgrades package to automatically apply security updates. Here are my notes on setting it up (on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server):

    $apt-get install unattended-upgrades update-notifier-common
    Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf/50unattended-upgrades.  Select only security upgrades, and set mail address
    	Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
    			"Ubuntu hardy-security";
    	//      "Ubuntu hardy-updates";
    	Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "youremail@yourdomain.com";
    Install mailx (required for unattended-upgrades mail to work)
    	$apt-get install mailx
    Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic :
    	APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "1";

Using this configuration, security updates will be automatically applied, and the list of updates will be emailed to you. While it may be considered dangerous to automatically apply any update, I believe that keeping up with security updates is a task worthy of the risk... and franky, "keeping up" requires automation.

As far as keeping packages up to date, I asked a question to clarify the meaning of dist-upgrade that you might find applicable. Basically, when you do an apt-get upgrade, installed packages will be upgraded only if the upgrade doesn't require new packages or the removal of a package (e.g. the dependencies don't change). If an upgraded package has new dependencies, then you need to use apt-get dist-upgrade instead. Since apt-get dist-upgrade also does everything that apt-get upgrade does, I typically use it by default. It's important to keep an eye on which packages are going to be modified and take any precautions you may find necessary.

In short:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

If I'm nervous about what dist-upgrade wants to do, I'll do:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

To at least upgrade packages that don't have new dependencies until I do a little research. There's always a chance that something will break no matter what you do, however, so you just gotta have some faith :)

As a final note, as long as you're applying security updates, and you trust that Canonical is doing a good job keeping things patched, you may find it's not terribly necessary to keep packages up to date. If the server is working without fault, well... it's working.

share|improve this answer
The debian team now recommends using aptitude over apt-get when updating. "The recommended way to upgrade from previous Debian GNU/Linux releases is to use the package management tool aptitude. This program makes safer decisions about package installations than running apt-get directly. " –  sparks Dec 4 '09 at 14:41
Thanks, I'll update the answer. –  Boden Dec 4 '09 at 16:18
aptitude update

aptitude safe-upgrade

The Debian team recommends aptitude over apt-get these days. However, I've also seen a few places say if you've been using apt-get on a specific server you should continue to do so and just use aptitude on future boxen.

share|improve this answer
I've been using the following line in root's crontab: 15 2 * * * aptitude update > /dev/null 2>&1; aptitude -y safe-upgrade > /dev/null 2>&1 –  David Hicks Dec 2 '09 at 22:57
Im not sure its wise to do safe-upgrades without first looking them over. I'd suggest "aptitude update > /dev/null 2>&1; aptitude -y -d safe-upgrade > /dev/null 2>&1" - This way you only download em. Then you can do it attended with aptitude safe-upgrade. –  artifex Dec 3 '09 at 12:03
Never said you shouldn't look at them. Those are just the commands I use when updating. –  sparks Dec 3 '09 at 16:41
Its in crontab and directs all output to /dev/null! –  artifex Dec 4 '09 at 6:47

I usually use aptitude full-upgrade, but it's not contained in the manpage. Strange...

You can configure ubuntu to limit the updates to LTS versions, so that you wouldn't get offered to update to a current newer version that's not LTS. However, the day the next LTS is out, it will offer to update to that. You might or you might not want that on the first day...

As I'm not on an LTS version currently I can't look for the setting as it's not offered. I'll have a look back in the office and edit this entry tomorrow unless somebody points to the relevant settings before I get to it.

share|improve this answer

I take a hybrid approach. I want upgrades to be applied as soon as possible, but not in an "unattended" fashion, since I have had upgrades break things before.

I run a cron job every night with the following command:


Then if there are any upgrades available, they are downloaded and sitting there waiting for me when i read my email in the morning. Then I simply run

apt-get dist-upgrade

manually and watch for issues. Often I will do a backup or snapshot of a server before performing the upgrade, if the packages appear critical to the functionality of that server.

This solves the problem for me by notifying me immediately (or whenever the cron job was run) of any available upgrades, but still allows me to be there when the actual upgrade takes place.

As for your second question about held-back packages. I don't often see them (perhaps because I use "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade"). But when I do, I have found that the problems can usually be resolved by removing and re-installing the package in question.

share|improve this answer

If you're just concerned with keeping it secure, you can use cron-apt to set up automatic updating, and comment out everything except the security repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


