Ubuntu Sneaky Unattended Upgrades

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Disable Automatic Updates on Ubuntu 20.04 step by step instructions

Warning: Disabling automatic updates comes with a security risk. Do it on your own risk and only when you know what you are upto

Once automatic updates are disabled, We have to manually use $ sudo apt update and $ sudo apt upgrade to keep your system updated. Thats on you!

There are some situations when you may want to disable automatic updates. For example if you receive these error messages:

Reading package lists... Done
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/

The above is a result of a triggered automatic updates procedure where apt locked down the /var/lib/apt/lists/lock file, thus the administrator is prevented from installing new packages and is forced to wait until the automatic updates refresh cycle is completed.

(This happened to me when using packer to build a VM and unattended upgrades killed my time around 6 to 9 mins each time for building the VM)

How to disable Automatic Updates from command line

Open and edit the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

$ sudoedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

Change the configs

From:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

To:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "0";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "0";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";