To determine whether your Vagrant is out of date or not, issue:

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$ vagrant version
Installed Version: 1.7.4
Latest Version: 1.7.4
You're running an up-to-date version of Vagrant!

If yours is out of date, you can download it from its download page. However, being a lazy programmer, that’s still too many clicks. I want to figure out a way to update or install Vagrant from the command line without prompt.

And here you go!

Vagrant binaries are distributed by Bintray, its format is:

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https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_{version}.msi

For example:

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https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.7.4.msi

After you issue vagrant version, you know the correct version to upgrade, then download it:

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$ curl -sSL https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.7.4.msi > vagrant.msi

Install it by msiexec:

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$ msiexec /i C:\Users\Chao\Downloads\vagrant.msi /passive /norestart

Make sure to use the full path instead of relative .\vagrant.msi, and Vagrant should be installed in the default location C:\HashiCorp\Vagrant. To find out all possible options, Just type msiexec command only.

Saving a few clicks!

This is for Debian/Ubuntu flavored systems.

Keep a single server up to date is easy, but updating multiple servers at once, you need tools like Ansible. For each server, here is a list of basic steps:

1. Check if there are packages available to be upgraded
2. Upgrade all packages to the latest version
3. Check if a reboot is required
4. Reboot the server

When we log into the remote server, we might see the message showing the number of packages can be updated. The message is generated by:

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$ sudo /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available 
25 packages can be updated.
18 updates are security updates.

And it is available at:

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$ cat /var/lib/update-notifier/updates-available                                       
25 packages can be updated.
18 updates are security updates.

We don’t need that detailed information, we just simply want to know if there are update available.

Shell script /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check shows any pending updates:

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$ /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check
25;18

To list all the packages instead of simple packages;security format:

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$ /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --package-names

--package-names option will write data to stderr instead of stdout. If there are no packages needed to be installed, then the stderr should be empty.

If there are packages to be installed or upgraded. Ansible has the apt module to manage them in Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

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- name: Check if there are packages available to be installed/upgraded
  command: /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --package-names
  register: packages
- name: Upgrade all packages to the latest version
  apt: update_cache=yes upgrade=dist
  when: packages.stderr != ""