How do I non-interactively update FreeBSD system (and ports)?
On FreeBSD-10.2 there's a new option to allow this:
freebsd-update fetch --not-running-from-cron
From the manpage:
--not-running-from-cron
Force freebsd-update fetch to proceed when there is no
controlling tty. This is for use by automated scripts and
orchestration tools. Please do not run freebsd-update
fetch from crontab or similar using this flag, see:
freebsd-update cron
On FreeBSD 10.0R and later, set PAGER environment variable on freebsd-update
env PAGER=cat freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
For portsnap(8) on FreeBSD 10.0R and later, default behaviour, namely without --interactive
option, is non-interactive.
portsnap fetch update
For FreeBSD < 10, the following works:
Allow freebsd-update
to run fetch without stdin
attached to a terminal:
sed 's/\[ ! -t 0 \]/false/' /usr/sbin/freebsd-update > /tmp/freebsd-update
chmod +x /tmp/freebsd-update
Allow portsnap
to run fetch without stdin
attached to a terminal:
sed 's/\[ ! -t 0 \]/false/' /usr/sbin/portsnap > /tmp/portsnap
chmod +x /tmp/portsnap
Credits: veewee
For FreeBSD 10+, the solution in the answer below by @uchida should be preferred!
Blindly installing updates (even freebsd-update
updates) can be a Bad Thing: One option in rc.conf
changes, and suddenly your machine has no SSH daemon anymore.
Similarly you probably don't want to blindly install all available port updates via portsnap
/ portupgrade -a
-- you might take a major version number bump and break the universe, or you might just have a port with new configuration options that need to be changed (you can make ports just accept whatever their defaults are, but sometimes that's not what you want).
The best way to do this is to use a configuration management tool like Puppet or radmind to deploy your changes.
Make a machine template based on a box you've successfully upgraded and tested, then deploy that to the rest of your environment. This ensures that you're pushing out a working system configuration, and that you only have to do the manual steps once (on the machine you're templating from).