How to enable automatic updates in Ubuntu

When you use Ubuntu for a while you will recognise that it is asking you for several security updates from time to time. This can be a bit annoying since they appear pretty frequently. In this blog post we will configure ubuntu to silently install those updates.

This can be easily achieved by the following command:

sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades
sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades

From now on Ubuntu will trigger updates itself, unattended and automatically:

This package can download and install security upgrades automatically
 and unattended, taking care to only install packages from the
 configured APT source, and checking for dpkg prompts about
 configuration file changes.

You can activate this feature as well from your GUI interface by selecting Settings and click on the Updates tab. In the menu you should see a drop down to select Download and install automatically.