If you have a number of Ubuntu or Debian servers, especially if many of them are running within a private LAN with not direct access to the internet, then you should consider having a central place to cache all packages.
Approx is my favourite tool for caching packages, it’s lightweight and very simple to configure.
Installation & configuration
First lets install the package
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apt-get install approx |
Next lets do some configuration in /etc/approx/approx.conf
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# Here are some examples of remote repository mappings. # See http://www.debian.org/mirror/list for mirror sites. ubuntu http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu secure http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu # The following are the default parameter values, so there is # no need to uncomment them unless you want a different value. # See approx.conf(5) for details. #$cache /var/cache/approx #$interval 720 #$max_rate unlimited #$max_redirects 5 #$user approx #$group approx #$syslog daemon #$pdiffs true #$offline false #$max_wait 10 #$verbose false #$debug false |
The important part is the unique alias you give to each apt repository URL, in this case ubuntu will be the alias for the normal packages and secure for security packages.
Now edit /etc/apt/sources.list on all the servers inside the LAN:
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[...] deb http://<approx-server>:9999/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://<approx-server>:9999/ubuntu precise main [...] deb http://<approx-server>:9999/secure precise-security main deb-src http://<approx-server>:9999/secure precise-security main |
Replace the url with the approx server address and approx’s port 9999 then the alias specified in approx.conf
Now you’re ready to run apt-get update and install packages from the proxy server!
Where’s the approx daemon?
Some people may get confused with which daemon runs approx. It is invoked by inetd.
So if you want to start/stop approx, you’d need to invoke the openbsd-inetd service (for Ubuntu 12.04).
Refreshing the cache
Running and apt-get update which points to Approx will trigger approx to check for new packages.
Using approx with a proxy server
There may be a case where the server which is running approx, doesn’t have direct access to the internet and must go via a proxy server. Approx does not have proxy settings for approx.conf
The trick is to export an http_proxy environment variable for the inetd service (assuming you don’t have any other services invoked by inetd which you don’t want to let them use a proxy).
Under Ubuntu 12.04 edit inetd’s default file /etc/default/openbsd-inetd
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# openbsd-inetd settings OPTION="" export http_proxy=http://<proxy-server-address>:<proxy-server-port> |
Restart the inetd service and you’re done!
Beware of system wide environment variables!
I’ve come across a case where someone put the http_proxy environment variable inside the system wide environment file /etc/environment
This caused approx to not work at all because this meant on the approx server, an apt-get didn’t fetch the packages via approx, instead it tried to connect to the approx server address directly via the proxy server which obviously is wrong!
Make sure your proxy is running before doing an apt-get update
I’ve also come across a situation where an user attempted to install a package but but the proxy server wasn’t running, as a consequence Approx created a local cache of a 0 byte sized .deb package. So periodically check for those kind of bad files.