Automatically passing values to apt-get installer

jax8 · 03-29-2009, 09:33 AM

Hi

I am currently writing a bash script that will install some software for users given information they enter at the beginning of the script.

The problem is that sometimes the installer pops up with a blue screen where you configure certain aspects of the system.

For example
apt-get install slapd

When this is installed it will pop up with a screen where I have to enter values such as domain name, admin password etc.

How can I do this automatically

I tried:
apt-get install slapd < LDAPconfig

where LDAPconfig contained text and carriage returns where necessary but that did not work.

Hko · 03-29-2009, 10:26 AM

As far as I know that is not easy.

You can, however, change those blue dialog screen for something else. e.g. if you do "export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=readline" before the "apt-get" command, then the package configuration program will ask the questions on the terminal.

It looks like then this should work:

Code:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=readline
apt-get install slapd <config

# or:
cat config | apt-get install slapd

... but I tried it, and unfortunately it ignores the input from the config file.

The easiest, but abit quick-n-dirty, work-around I can think of now, is to set it so it does not ask any question:

Code:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt-get install slapd

And then just copy your configuration file(s) over the ones installed by the package. And do some other things the package needs from your script. Like in your example of installing slapd, you probably also want to generate an inital database from an LDIF file.

ta0kira · 03-29-2009, 11:31 AM

You might try to setsid apt-get so it doesn't have a controlling terminal (I assume readline uses ctermid to get an actual terminal instead of standard input.)
Kevin Barry