Automatic Patch And Reboot on CentOS Server 6 7 or 8

CentOS seems to lack easy commands for automatically patching a server and then rebooting it if anything needs restarting.

Basically I want to run a script via /etc/cronttab at regular intervals to patch a system and reboot if necessary.  Obviously this might cause an outage (very rarely, some service won't restart), so we do it early in the morning, and we don't patch paired systems at the same time.

My script for Centos 6, 7 or 8 is attached below but it's a bit scrappy!   Does anyone have a better way?

(UPDATED 19.6.20: Added 2>&1 stderr redirection to fix issue seen when running from /etc/cronttab on CentOS 8.)

HOWTO upload a Centos8 image to Digital Ocean

So you'd like to run Centos 8 on Digital Ocean... But the Cloud version of Centos 8 has not been released yet, so therefore Digital Ocean does not offer Centos 8 as an option...

No problem, just create a VM on your own workstation and then upload it as a Custom Image.

This HOWTO assumes you have a desktop running a Linux OS, with a copy of the free VMware Player installed.