Update / upgrade Debian and skip any interactions

Question

I'm running a tiny script to update and upgrade some Debian machines but since some weeks it always stopped due to some "news" the terminal is showing up. When manually upgrading I see a "fullscreen" (find screenshot below) from some software, which forces to press "q". I don't want to change any software so I'd like to find a solution, which allows to just skip every interactive screen, while upgrading.

Usually I was fine using:

sudo apt-get update -y 
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

After I realised that the upgrade process is interrupted without any timeout, I also tried to use the solution of this post:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y upgrade

but unfortunately with the same result. Does anybody have a solution to just upgrade a machine without any interruptions?

UPDATE:

First I just executed:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

Secondary edited the /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg file to:

# dpkg configuration file
#
# This file can contain default options for dpkg.  All command-line
# options are allowed.  Values can be specified by putting them after
# the option, separated by whitespace and/or an `=' sign.
#

# Do not enable debsig-verify by default; since the distribution is not using
# embedded signatures, debsig-verify would reject all packages.
no-debsig

# Log status changes and actions to a file.
log /var/log/dpkg.log

force-confold
force-confdef

Finally I executed:

sudo apt-get upgrade -yq

This did the trick regarding "press q to quit" - great!

I think it's also working to combine the commands executing:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew --force-confdef" --force-yes -yq upgrade

Unfortunately another similar problem shows up now:

Also trying to edit /etc/apt/listchanges.conf didn't work out unfortunately:

[apt]
frontend=none
email_address=root
confirm=0
save_seen=/var/lib/apt/listchanges.db
which=news

SOLUTION:

I noticed (sorry if this is obvious for an advanced linux user) that bash acts different, when you execute a command via script than directly entering the command into the console.

All in all it was enough for my script solution to add the -yp parameter and set the DEBIAN_FRONTEND. In order to be safe, I'd edit the /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg file too.

#!/bin/bash
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND
apt-get -yq update
apt-get -yq upgrade

Answer 1

you should set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, this will stop debconf prompts from appearing.

After that, add force-confold and force-confdef to your /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg file. then use the -y option

sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

or use this command

apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew --force-confdef" --force-yes -y upgrade

and if it doesn't work try

apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" --force-yes -y upgrade

Answer 2

The update information is given by apt-listchanges. If you never want to see these details, you can remove the package entirely. Otherwise, you can configure it using /etc/apt/listchanges.conf; in your case,

frontend=mail

or

frontend=none

will avoid the installation being interrupted.

(apt-listchanges is supposed to do the right thing in these circumstances, so it should be possible to fix it in other ways so that it still shows update details in interactive mode. In particular you could try adding the -q option to apt-get.)

Note that simply running

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

won't change anything, you need to ensure it ends up in the environment of the apt-get processes:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND