I have an Ubuntu server happily living it’s life as a NAS (and more) server which every now and then (if I forget to keep track of updates) it runs out of space on /boot causing issues removing old releases or partial updates to be a bit of a problem. So how do we either turn on or off automatic upgrades?
The configuration for this is stored in the file 20auto-upgrades. So we can edit the file using
sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
Within the file you’ll see something like this
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
Note: The “1” in the above are not True/False but the minimum number of days. So we could change from “1” to run weekly by changing this value to “7”. A value of “0” will disable the feature.
You can create the file yourself or run the following command to create the file (it can be used to turn on/off by running it on an existing file but that’s all)
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades
If you want to change the frequency of checks for updates you’ll need to edit the 20auto-upgrades manually (as already discussed).
References