How to install software packages in non-interactive batch mode on Debian or Ubuntu

Last updated on July 22, 2020 by Dan Nanni

If you are a system admin, at some point you may have wondered how to install a list of software packages in one shot. Manually installing software programs on multiple Linux systems would be a tedious job, and your time can be better spent elsewhere. If you seek to install multiple packages in non-interactive batch mode, you can check out this guideline. This is for Debian or Ubuntu systems.

APT is a Debian way of managing software packages. APT handles installation, removal and update of software packages, as well as automatically resolves problems of inter-package dependencies. As such, APT is ideal for non-interactive package installation.

If you have a text file containing a list of software packages to install, you can bulk install all the packages in one shot as follows.

$ sudo apt-get install -y `cat package.txt | tr "n" " "`

In the above, I assume that package.txt contains a list of package names (one package name in each row). The -y option forces yes for every confirmation dialog during installation, and thus is necessary in non-interactive batch mode.

While apt-get install command can easily override any confirmation prompt with -y option, apt-get upgrade that can pop-up various screens for configuration and warnings may not work. For example, when you upgrade your kernel using apt-get, you cannot circumvent a pop-up screen warning of reboot. In order to get around such pop-up configuration screens as well, there are two ways to do it.

In order to force non-interactive mode in apt-get system-wide, you can use reconfigure debconf as follows.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure debconf

In the subsequent package configuration screen, choose noninteractive interface. Then you won't be asked any question while using apt-get.

If you think that such system-wide change is too risky, you can set DEBIAN_FRONTEND environment variable to enter a temporary batch mode as follows.

$ sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install `cat package.txt | tr "n" " "`

Then non-interactive batch mode will be applied to a single invocation of apt-get install.

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