> Keeping Up to Date
Software is never static, and updated releases - whether to fix bugs, address security issues, or add features - appear in a seemingly never-ending stream.
Software in Tribblix is generally split into two parts - the underlying operating system (illumos), and the applications that you run on top of that. To update the underlying operating system, see the next section. To learn about application updates, read on.
All software updates and Tribblix upgrades need to be done as root.
The first part of the update process is to issue the following command:
zap refresh
This will not update any software, but will download newer versions of the software catalog. You can then see if any software updates are available:
zap verify-overlay -a
To update the components of one specific overlay to their current versions:
zap update-overlay overlay_name
To update the components of all installed overlays to their current versions:
zap update-overlay -a
The above can be simplified with a single invocation:
zap update-everything
Automatic updates
If you don't want to run zap update-everything by hand,
it's possible to automate the process so it's run regularly by
cron. You can use
crontab to set this up yourself,
or get zap to do it for you.
To enable automatic updates, run:
zap autoupdate -e
To disable automatic updates, run:
zap autoupdate -d
To disable show the current status of automatic updates, run:
zap autoupdate -s
By default, automatic updates will be scheduled to run every day, at the same time the command is run (as this is a time the system is known to be up). To only run updates once a week, add the -w flag:
zap autoupdate -e -w
To specify a time, such as 23:15, use the -t flag:
zap autoupdate -e -t 23:15
Note that the autoupdate process and system reboots and shutdowns aren't aware of each other, so automatic updates should be enabled with care and a suitable time chosen. The risk here is that the update process has removed the old version of a package and doesn't get a chance to install the new version, leaving some potentially important software missing.