Ubuntu – How to disable Apport from including a core dump

As of Ubuntu 16.04 systemd apport does not seem to honor its config file

The systemd commands to enable / disable apport are:

Disable

sudo systemctl disable apport.service

If that does not work, you would then need to mask the service

systemctl mask apport.service

To reenable

systemctl unmask apport.service # if you masked it
sudo systemctl enable apport.service

Previous versions of Ubuntu:

You need to edit /etc/default/apport. The following changes will prevent Apport from starting at boot:

Graphical: Open a terminal with (CTRL+ALT+T) and type this:

sudo -i gedit /etc/default/apport

and then push ENTER. You password is being typed, but will not display as dots.

or

Command line:

sudo nano /etc/default/apport

A file editor is now open. Change enabled from "0" to a "1" so it looks like this:

enabled=1    

To turn it off make it:

enabled=0

Now save your changes and close the file editor. Apport will now no longer start at boot. If you want to turn it off immediately without rebooting, run sudo service apport stop.

You can also use sudo service apport stop without modifying /etc/default/apport to turn it off temporarily.

See also:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs#A4._Collect_information_about_the_bug

1. It looks close, but might not be what you need. Apport automatically changes /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern. So if that can't be changed, you're pretty much out of luck. On the other hand, apport is in the default Ubuntu install now, so practically everyone using Ubuntu already has that parameter changed by it. I'm also not aware of any way to tell apport to keep more than the most recent crash from a particular app, but as long as each crash is uploaded, that's not an issue.
2. I'd refer to it as third-party.
3. Apport supports executables installed in /opt. You will need to provide a hook in /opt/path/to/your/app/share/apport/package-hooks.
4. You can set a custom crash database in the package-hook for your package. But if your crash database doesn't act like debbugs or launchpad, you will also need to create a custom crash database connector implementation, which doesn't look like it can be done without installing a python file outside of /opt.
5. The executable needs to be installed by dpkg, which means you need to package it in a .deb file.
6. You have to create a source package in order to create a binary package, because binary packages are created from source packages. You do not need to distribute the source package.
7. Apport works with anything packaged as a .deb file.