How do I enable fancy apt colours and progress bars?

I've heard that apt has a new fancy colour and progress bar feature, but that I have to manually enable it.

How do I do this?

For 14.04 and newer:

Make a file in: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d:

sudoedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99progressbar

Then add these contents:

Dpkg::Progress-Fancy "1";

And save the file.

Then if your umask was not 0027, (i.e. it might also be 0023), then also set this new file's permissions to 644 (i.e. -rw-r--r--) as follows:

$ chmod 644 99progressbar

(Without this permission correction things like Debian's reportbug will stop working.)

Now enjoy apt progress bars in all their glory:

You can use them with these commands for a nice new apt experience:

apt update
apt install
apt upgrade

Run apt by itself for the list of commands. Colors are enabled by default for apt, and do not affect apt-get.

Colors:

You can also tweak the color of the progress bar by adding this as well:

Dpkg::Progress-Fancy::Progress-Bg "%1b[40m"; 

The colors are based on ANSI Color codes, look at this chart as a reference.

Sources:

• Michael Vogt's blogpost on apt 1.0

The -o option allows to change the behavior temporarily. I described it here:

It's just not an apt-get default, but also available for apt-get, run it with

-o Dpkg::Progress-Fancy="1"

for example

sudo apt-get -o Dpkg::Progress-Fancy="1" install alpine-pico