Proxmox VE Update Notifications in the Lab

I had configured the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) in my lab to send notifications by email, for example about any software package updates available.

But I did not get any notifications about the updates. However, the same notification settings in the production cluster worked fine.

It seems PVE has a feature (as of PVE 9.1) in the cluster notifications that prevent sending the update notifications by default when the nodes are not licensed with a proper subscription.

---

Short fix

You need to run this command on any of the nodes in the PVE cluster to enable the package update notifications:

pvesh set /cluster/options --notify package-updates=always

Verification:

root@pve1:~# pvesh get /cluster/options --noborder | grep notify
notify       {"package-updates":"always"}
root@pve1:~#

---

Long version of the story

As of publishing this (2026-04-28), with pve-manager 9.1.9, the update notifications work like this:

• pve-daily-update.timer is run daily
• It starts pve-daily-update.service
• Which runs /usr/bin/pveupdate
• Starting from line 55, it first reads /etc/pve/datacenter.cfg (the cluster-level configuration), specifically the notify key there, and then checks the package-updates value from it
• Three values are recognized:
  • package-updates=auto (the default if not configured): the package update notifications are only sent if the system has an active subscription
  • package-updates=always: package update notifications are always sent (regardless of the subscription status)
  • package-updates=never: package update notifications are never sent
• It then updates the package databases, sending (or not) the notifications as needed.

Interestingly, the man page of datacenter.cfg says the package-updates value is deprecated:

root@pve1:~# man 5 datacenter.cfg
...
      package-updates=<always | auto | never> (default = auto)
          DEPRECATED: Use datacenter notification settings
          instead. Control how often the daily update job
          should send out notifications:
          •   auto daily for systems with a valid subscription,
              as those are assumed to be production-ready and
              thus should know about pending updates.
          •   always every update, if there are new pending
              updates.
          •   never never send a notification for new pending
              updates.
...

But in /usr/bin/pveupdate it does not check anything else but this package-updates value. I believe this will change at some point as it has been acknowledged by Proxmox staff already in 2024.

That said, the settings in Datacenter – Notifications still need to be properly set in order to receive the notifications:

• You need to have a working Notification Target (I use the SMTP relay of my lab network)
• You need to have a Notification Matcher that matches the package-updates type, using the notification target.