Common Proxmox Container Setup

In order to make the most use of your Proxmox Container, this article explains a common setup that’s used throughout all my Proxmox Containers.

Updates

To run updates I mostly run the following commands:

• apt-get update: Retrieve new lists of packages
• apt-get dist-upgrade: Distribution upgrade
• apt-get autoremove: Remove automatically all unused packages
• apt-get autoclean: Erase old downloaded archive files
• apt-get clean: Erase downloaded archive files

Instead of running these commands manually, consider adding them to the ~/.bashrc. You can do this by creating an alias and chaining the commands as follows:

alias update='apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean && apt-get clean'

If you do not want to confirm the upgrade and autoremove write the alias as follows:

alias update='apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y && apt-get autoremove -y && apt-get autoclean && apt-get clean'

Now reconnect to your SSH connection or reopen a terminal and you are able to use the update command. It is also possible to run source ~/.bashrc without closing your current session.

Locale

On the container the locale is not automagically set, to do this run:

dpkg-reconfigure locales 

this will open a selection window, select the locale applicable to you (I use en_US.UTF-8) and select Ok. In the next screen select the same locale again and select Ok.

To use this freshly set locale, log out of your console session and log in again!

SSH Access

Optionally, depending on your security preferences, you can enable SSH access to your container. To enable SSH have a look at wiki.mphslaats.com.
I mostly enable SSH only if I need to copy files to the container, otherwise, I leave it disabled.