Updating company-wide and your own hosts with apt-dater

apt-dater (package available) is a really handy tool to update Debian packages on a large fleet of servers.

You install and configure it, add your company’s hosts into it and then you can keep an eye on outstanding package updates and update the whole fleet with a few key strokes.

But can you manage company servers and separately from that your own machines with apt-dater?

Yes, you can!

I assume that your apt-dater config files are under $HOME/.config/apt-dater.

$ cat ~/.config/apt-dater/hosts.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE hosts SYSTEM "file:///usr/share/xml/schema/apt-dater/hosts.dtd">
<hosts xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">

  <xi:include href="local-hosts.xml" xpointer="xpointer(/hosts/*)">
    <xi:fallback />
  </xi:include>

  <group name="my company's hosts">
    <host name="webserver"/>
    [...]
  </group>

  [...]
</hosts>

$ cat ~/.config/apt-dater/local-hosts.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE hosts SYSTEM "file:///usr/share/xml/schema/apt-dater/hosts.dtd">
<hosts xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <group name="my personal hosts">
    <host name="my own machine"/>
    [...]
  </group>
</hosts>

And that’s it. Now you can manage your own machines separately from your company’s machines but you can update them all in one go.