Apt Updates with Ansible

I’ve got a small Ansible script that I bundle up on Ubuntu boxes to do apt updates. This was originally a one-statement job, but I’ve added a few lines to it, so I thought I’d explain what I’m doing (more for myself, for later!)

Initally, I just had a task to do apt: upgrade=full update_cache=yes autoremove=yes autoclean-yes but if you’re running the script over and over again, well, this gets slow… So I added a tweak!

Here it is folks, in all it’s glory!

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Get stat of last run apt
    stat:
      path: /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
    register: apt_run

  - name: "Apt update, Full-upgrade, autoremove, autoclean check"
    debug:
      msg: "Skipping apt-update, etc. actions as apt update was run today"
    when: "'%Y-%m-%d' | strftime(apt_run.stat.mtime) in ansible_date_time.date"

  - name: "Apt update, Full-upgrade, autoremove, autoclean"
    apt:
      upgrade: full
      update_cache: yes
      autoremove: yes
      autoclean: yes
    when: "'%Y-%m-%d' | strftime(apt_run.stat.mtime) not in ansible_date_time.date"

What does this do? Well, according to this AskUbuntu post, the best file to check if an update has been performed is /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin, so we check the status of that file. Most file systems available to Linux distributions provide the mtime – or “last modified time”. This is returned in the number of seconds since UTC 00:00:00 on the Unix Epoch (1970-01-01), so we need to convert that to a date., which we return as YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. today is 2020-01-06) and then compare that to what the system thinks today is. If the dates don’t equate (so one string doesn’t match the other – in other words, apt update wasn’t run today), it runs the update. If the dates do match up, we get a statement saying that apt update was already run.

Fun times!