Puppet Error Could not get lock var lib dpkg lock open 11 Resource temporarily unavailable E Unable to lock the administration directory var lib dpkg is another process using it

Question

While trying to install puppet 6.7( puppet server) on Linux 18.04, I get the following error. How do I resolve it?

Answer 1

I faced the same error while i was trying to install puppet server. Here's what i did:

To fix the problem, all you need to do is to remove the lock files. But before you do that, it would be a good idea to stop any process that is using the lock files.

Use the lsof command to get the process ID of the process holding the lock files. 

Run these commands one by one.

lsof /var/lib/dpkg/lock
lsof /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
lsof /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

It’s possible that the commands don’t return anything, or return just one number. If they do return at least one number, use the number(s) and kill the processes like this (replace the PID with the numbers you got from the above commands):

sudo kill -9 PID

You can now safely remove the lock files using the commands below:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/lock
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

After that, reconfigure the packages:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Now if you run the sudo apt update command, everything should be fine.

This worked for me!