Keeping your Raspberry Pi Up-to-date

Basically any time you want to add programs, make changes, do anything on the Pi you want to run these two commands to make sure everything stays up-to-date and functioning.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

The apt-get update gets a list of all available packages (based on what you’ve got installed) and their current versions. It doesn’t actually do anything other that update that list.

The apt-get upgrade then uses that list to know which packages need to be upgraded, and downloads and installs those upgrades.

To do a bit more in the update, you can change the upgrade to dist-upgrade. While upgrade just updates installed packages, dist-upgrade will find and install dependencies, or remove packages and dependencies it deems no longer required.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you’re not happy with other things being added, or are uncomfortable with things being automatically removed, then stick to just using upgrade. If you want everything handled for you then you can use dist-upgrade.

For further reading:

• What is the difference between apt-get update and upgrade?
• Linux apt-get Manual