How To Create A Local Debian/Ubuntu Mirror With apt-mirror
Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
This tutorial shows how to create a Debian/Ubuntu mirror for your local network with the tool apt-mirror. Having a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror is good if you have to install multiple systems in your local network because then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.
I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!
1 Preliminary Note
You can set up a Debian and Ubuntu mirror on both Debian and Ubuntu systems, i.e., a Debian system can be a Debian and a Ubuntu mirror, as well as a Ubuntu system can be a Ubuntu and a Debian mirror.
Please note that you need a fast internet connection to download all the packages to your mirror as well as a lot of hard disk space. In my tests I mirrored the main, contrib, and non-free sections of Debian Sarge and the main, restricted, and universe sections of Ubuntu Edgy Eft which took about 25GB of hard disk space and about 6 hours of download time on a 16MBit DSL line.
I will not mirror security updates in this tutorial - I think it's a good idea to always download security updates directly from the internet. That way you can be sure you get the latest ones.
I've tested this on a Debian Sarge and a Ubuntu Edgy Eft system. If you use different Debian/Ubuntu versions, the procedure might differ a little bit. You should have already set up a basic Debian Sarge system (e.g. as outlined on pages one and two of https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_sarge) or a basic Ubuntu Edgy Eft system (e.g. as outlined on pages one to three of https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.10).
In this example my local mirror has the IP address 192.168.0.100.
2 Install apt-mirror
2.1 Modify /etc/apt/sources.list (Debian Sarge only)
If you are on Debian Sarge, you must modify /etc/apt/sources.list to install apt-mirror. I don't know if this is necessary on Debian Etch or Sid, please try it yourself. This step is not necessary for Ubuntu Edgy Eft.
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
Please add the following line to the file:
[...] deb http://apt-mirror.sourceforge.net/ apt-mirror/ [...] |
Then update the packages database:
apt-get update
2.2 Install apt-mirror
This step is for all systems (Debian and Ubuntu). To install apt-mirror, please run
apt-get install apt-mirror
3 Install Apache
Later on, I want to access my new local Debian/Ubuntu mirror over http, therefore I install the Apache web server now:
apt-get install apache2
The default document root is /var/www, I will create symlinks from that directory to the location of the Debian and Ubuntu repository later on.
4 Configure apt-mirror
apt-mirror's configuration file is /etc/apt/mirror.list. There should already be a default configuration in it; on Debian Sarge the file looks like this:
# apt-mirror configuration file ## ## The default configuration options (uncomment and change to override) ## # # set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror # set mirror_path $base_path/mirror # set skel_path $base_path/skel # set var_path $base_path/var # # set defaultarch |
On Ubuntu Edgy Eft, the file looks like this:
############# config ################## # # set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror # # if you change the base path you must create the directories below with write privlages # # set mirror_path $base_path/mirror # set skel_path $base_path/skel # set var_path $base_path/var # set cleanscript $var_path/clean.sh # set defaultarch |
If you compare the file with /etc/apt/sources.list, you will see that it's very similar. /etc/apt/mirror.list mainly lists the repositories that should be mirrored, plus a few other options.
Now we modify /etc/apt/mirror.list. As I said before, I want to mirror the main, contrib, and non-free sections of Debian Sarge and the main, restricted, and universe sections of Ubuntu Edgy Eft, but I don't want to mirror the security updates as these should be downloaded directly from the internet. Also, I don't want to mirror the source packages because in 95% of all installations you don't need source packages, and they need a lot of space on the hard disk. So my /etc/apt/mirror.list looks like this:
vi /etc/apt/mirror.list
# apt-mirror configuration file ## ## The default configuration options (uncomment and change to override) ## # # set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror # set mirror_path $base_path/mirror # set skel_path $base_path/skel # set var_path $base_path/var # # set defaultarch |
Please note that I used ftp.de.debian.org instead of ftp.fi.debian.org and de.archive.ubuntu.com instead of archive.ubuntu.com. You should use mirrors that are close to you, so if you are in the U.S., for example, replace de with us, and so on.
The cleaning section at the end tells apt-mirror in which directories on the local hard disk it should check to see if hard disk space can be freed. I want to check the whole local repositories for both Debian and Ubuntu, therefore I specify
clean http://ftp.de.debian.org/
clean http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/
If you want to use other Debian/Ubuntu versions, simply replace sarge with etch or sid and edgy with breezy, dapper, etc.
