How do you use apt-get to only install critical security updates on ubuntu?

Question

How do you use apt-get to only install critical security updates on ubuntu?

We'd like to only upgrade packages that need to be upgraded for security reasons, without upgrading all other packages.

Answer 1

Try sudo unattended-upgrade: is used for automatic security updates (I believe it's used when asked during the installer); should be a manual method of invoking it. Try the man pages for it.

Answer 2

I read the apt-get man page carefully when I got tired of manually editing the sources.list every time I wanted to only apply security updates (that means the second time).

Figured this solution out:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/security.sources.list

Edit the latter to contain only security repositories, then:

sudo apt-get upgrade -o Dir::Etc::SourceList=/etc/apt/security.sources.list

Tadaaaa... Scriptable stuff.

Answer 3

I don't know if it will work, but apt has it's sources in /etc/apt/sources.list and/or /etc/sources.list.d/

Why not edit the file, and comment all lines that are not part of the security updates ?

The security lines for apt should be something like this:

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ..... ..... ...

Leave those lines alone and comment all the others.