About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I love percent and lambda characters. Qubes OS core team member, former OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.

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pkgupdate, an OpenBSD script to update packages fast

Written by Solène, on 15 August 2021.
Tags: #openbsd

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Table of contents

1. Introduction §

pkgupdate is a simple shell script meant for OpenBSD users of the stable branchs (people following releases) to easily keep their packages up to date.

It is meant to be run daily by cron on servers on at boot time for workstations (you can obviously configure it how you prefer).

pkgupdate git repository (web view)

2. Why ? How ? §

Basically, I've explained all of this in the project repository README file.

I strongly think updating packages at boot time is important for workstation users, so the process has to be done fast and efficiently, without requiring user agreement (by setting this up, the sysadmin agreed).

As for servers, it could be useful to by running this a few time a day and using checkrestart program to notify the admin if some process is required to restart after an update.

3. Whole setup §

Too long, didn't read? Here the code to make the thing up! 

$ su -
# git clone https://tildegit.org/solene/pkgupdate.git
# cp pkgupdate/pkgupdate /usr/local/bin/
# crontab -e (which will open EDITOR, add the following lines)

### BEGIN this goes into crontab
# for updating on boot
@reboot /usr/local/bin/pkgupdate
### END of this goes into crontab