aptt

Small Debian/Ubuntu upgrade helper script focused on giving a clean overview before running a full upgrade.

Originally written for personal use on Debian sid/testing systems, but also tested on Debian stable, Proxmox hosts and LXC containers.

Philosophy

aptt intentionally tries to remain:

• small
• readable
• dependency-light
• shell-native
• predictable

The goal is not to replace apt, but to provide a cleaner daily workflow around it.

Features

• concise default output
• simulated full-upgrade preview
• held package detection
• autoremove visibility
• installed kernel overview
• reboot-required detection
• optional verbose mode
• optional pager mode
• optional unattended yes mode
• self-update check
• lightweight single-file shell script

Why?

On systems with many packages, especially sid/testing systems, normal apt upgrade output can become very noisy and easy to lose in scrollback.

aptt tries to provide:

• a compact daily-driver mode
• a more detailed inspection mode
• a pager mode for large upgrades
• a quick overview before committing to a full-upgrade

Requirements

aptt uses standard Debian tools.

For self-update checks and the installation examples below, curl is needed.

Install curl if needed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl

Installation

Download directly:

sudo curl -fsSL -o /usr/local/bin/aptt \
https://git.het.net/dth/aptt/raw/branch/main/aptt

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/aptt

Run as root:

sudo aptt

Usage

Normal mode

sudo aptt

Example:

apt update...
134 upgraded, 0 new, 0 removed, 0 not upgraded
0 held, 0 autoremove candidates, 3 installed kernels

Proceed to apt full-upgrade step? [y/N]

---

Verbose mode

Shows:

• held packages
• upgradable package list
• autoremove details
• installed kernels
• simulated Inst/Conf dependency output
• detailed needrestart output

sudo aptt -v

---

Pager mode

Verbose mode through a pager.

Useful for large upgrades on servers or sid/testing systems.

sudo aptt -p

---

Automatic yes mode

Automatically answers yes to apt prompts.

sudo aptt -y

Can also be combined:

sudo aptt -p -y

Optional tools

Some functionality improves when optional packages are installed:

• less — pager support
• needrestart — detect services and kernels needing a restart after upgrade
• mosh — more resilient remote sessions during upgrades

Install optional tools:

sudo apt-get install less needrestart mosh

Notes

• -p automatically enables verbose mode
• container environments may show:
  • 0 installed kernels
  • reboot checks not applicable
• aptt intentionally uses apt-get internally instead of apt to avoid unstable CLI warnings in scripts

Security note

aptt is intended to be run as root.

For that reason it does not auto-update itself. It only checks whether a newer version is available and leaves updating to the user.

Always review the script before installing or updating it.

Changelog

0.5.6

• fix: suppress Hit/Get noise in verbose apt update output (show only warnings/errors/summary)
• fix: add NEEDRESTART_SUSPEND=1 during full-upgrade to prevent needrestart running twice as dpkg hook
• fix: remove redundant "Simulated full-upgrade" section from verbose output (actual upgrade output follows immediately)

0.5.5

• fix: force LANG=C LC_ALL=C to ensure English apt output regardless of system locale
• fix: held_count now uses grep -c instead of wc -l, preventing a false count of 1 on empty held list
• fix: needrestart called with -r l (list mode) to prevent interactive hang in unattended -y mode
• perf: single apt-get -s dist-upgrade simulation reused for both upgradable list and summary parsing, removing duplicate apt-get -s upgrade call

0.5.4

• updated security consideration

Repository

https://git.het.net/dth/aptt

License

MIT