Count Upgradable Packages on Alpine Linux

I like to use Alpine Linux for cloud servers because it’s extremely small, so I don’t have to add extra RAM just to run the operating system. But I like knowing when updated packages are available. You need root to update the local list of available packages first, but that can be automated safely (see below): doas apk update Just asking Alpine is easy, and doesn’t require extra permissions: apk list -u That gives you a detailed list of upgradable packages. Or to get a quieter result with just the names: apk list -uq And this being Linux, it’s easy to get a word count with wc (yes, it’ll count hyphenated package names as a single word): apk list -uq | wc -w Automating the List Updates To get APK to update its package list daily, I’ve put the following in /etc/periodic/daily/apk-update.sh: #!/bin/sh apk update That doesn’t install anything, so it’s safe to let it check on a daily basis. Of course that doesn’t tell me anything, it just makes sure the list is relatively current when I…