Automatic update & upgrade

[A Former User]

Hello,

does Cloudron update/upgrade the server automatically (apt update & apt upgrade)? If not, how can i configure a automatic update and upgrade?

[nebulon]

Cloudron takes care of all updates and upgrades on its own. It is not recommended to run them manually, even if there are pending updates seen in apt. Security updates are applied daily, however other packages might not be updated, unless that was tested.

All in all, to answer the question, yes your server already does it for you with Cloudron.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Automatic update & upgrade:

Cloudron takes care of all updates and upgrades on its own.

Wow, brilliant! I was just wondering this myself, great to know!

[A Former User]

Other question: Does Cloudron reboot the server automatically, if updates are finished? I get the message "This server requires a reboot to finalize Ubuntu security updates.". What is if i ignore the message?

[nebulon]

Reboots are not automatic

[will]

@timo If you ignore the message, the relevant security updates are not installed and you are still vulnerable. Its not super critical to reboot ASAP, I usually let mine go a few days, but any more than that and it becomes risky. Remember, Cloudron is the home for all your personal and perhaps business data. Caution is advised.

[yusf]

Is it a good idea to schedule occasional reboots via cron on the Cloudron system?

[nebulon]

Maybe it could make sense to add an option to schedule reboots during the night if required? Adding a cron job without checking if it is actually required might be a bit over to the top.

[A Former User]

@nebulon Yes, a very good Idea.

[msbt]

also some of my servers are encrypted and require me to enter a password when booting, this would take the whole thing offline until I enter it, so this needs to be optional

[nebulon]

Very good point about the reboot with encryption!

[A Former User]

@nebulon Do you add this feature at the next cloudron version?

[yusf]

@msbt Off topic, but what encryption method do you use?

[msbt]

@yusf it's mostly VMs on dedicated Proxmox hosts with standard full disk encryption (luks I believe), but I just realized they're all still on 16.04, gonna have to do some updating

[yusf]

@msbt I have to look that up.

That reminds me of an on-topic question. Does Cloudron also handles dist upgrades? If not, how should I perform those myself without breaking anything?

[msbt]

it does not, but there's this blogpost: https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-11-26-upgrading-to-bionic.html

[yusf]

Thanks, I haven’t seen it.

It makes me wonder what happens when a Cloudron’s host system reaches its end-of-life. Email notification perhaps?

[girish]

Only security updates are applied automatically. Dist upgrade have to be done by hand. If dist upgrade fails, best bet is to restore into a new instance from a backup.

[yusf]

@girish Probably even faster to simply migrate to a new VPS direcly, yeah?

[ruihildt]

@yusf From my experience, yes. And you're sure to start from a clean slate for another few years.

[girish]

Yeah, my experience with ubuntu upgades especially dist upgade is spotty at best. I just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 19 yesterday and it was total fail. I just re-installed and started afresh. What I do is to backup my $HOME and put it back in a new installation.

[yusf]

@girish All these years and it’s still a pain >_<

Edit: I’m referring to Linux distros ofc, not Cloudron.