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wheeler's avatar

How does forge run automatic security updates?

From the Forge features page:

Up-To-Date Server Configuration Take advantage of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and our tailored server configurations, complete with Nginx, PHP 7.0, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and automated security updates.

I've looked in all the obvious places:

  • nothing was scheduled inside Forge by default, except for composer self-update
  • The forge and root user do not have crontabs
  • There is nothing relevant in /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.monthly etc
  • nothing regarding updates in /var/log/syslog since I provisioned yesterday

I'm not daunted if I have to set this up myself, I just don't want to duplicate the process, and I can't work out where and how Forge has implemented it.

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5 replies
TylerODonnell's avatar
Level 28

I'm not 100% positive, but I believe Forge is using the unattended-upgrades package. The cron job should be located in /etc/cron.daily/apt

wheeler's avatar

thanks @TylerODonnell , i'd never heard of unattended upgrades. I can confirm it is installed out of the box and writes to /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log. You can also see the last run time with

ls -lh /var/lib/apt/periodic
jan_zikmund's avatar

Hi, sorry to dig up an old thread.

I have just checked the unattended upgrades log in

sudo less /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log

and for the last couple of days it says: No packages found that can be upgraded unattended and no pending auto-removals. But when I log in to the server, on the welcome message it says

163 packages can be updated.
21 updates are security updates.

What am I missing here? Does Forge only update certain packages while other it leaves to be updated manually? I was aware it doesn't update sensible services that can cause downtime as per their docs, but I would expect the security updates should be done?

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