I got the error message to go away by putting the following in my provisioning script, prior to any apt-get calls: export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive This makes debconf use a frontend that expects no interactive input at all, preventing it from even trying to access stdin.
The apt history is in /var/log/apt/history.log as said in a comment above. That said, this will not list packages that were installed manually, using dpkg or GUIs such as gdebi. To see all the packages that went through dpkg, you can look at /var/log/dpkg.log.
Note: in the following commands, a command beginning with ‘root#’ means it needs to be run as root. To find which files were installed by a package, use dpkg -L: $ dpkg -L $package apt-file can tell you which files will be installed by a package before installing it: root# apt-get install apt-file root# apt-file … Read more
Ubuntu 16.04 comes with PHP7 as the standard, so there are no PHP5 packages However if you like you can add a PPA to get those packages anyways: Remove all the stock php packages List installed php packages with dpkg -l | grep php| awk ‘{print $2}’ |tr “\n” ” ” then remove unneeded packages … Read more