System Updates

Keeping the system updated is vital before starting anything on your system. This will prevent people to use known vulnerabilities to enter in your system.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean

Enable Automatic Security Updates

Enable automatic updates can be crucial for your server security. It is very important to stay up to date.

You can install the unattended-upgrades by using this command:

sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades

To enable it, run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

This will create the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades with the following contents:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

Customize automatic updates

You can customize the automatic updates if you prefer. For example, you can get notifications when a security update is completed.

To enable ONLY security updates, please change the code to look like this:

  // Automatically upgrade packages from these (origin:archive) pairs
  Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
      "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-security";
  //  "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-updates";
  //  "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-proposed";
  //  "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-backports";
  };

To get notification by email, update the following line with your email address:

//Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "my_user@my_domain.com";