Step 1: Install apt-mirror
sudo apt-get install apt-mirror
(Universe repository needed)
Step 2: Configure apt-mirror
Configuring apt-mirror is fairly simple. We just need to modify the /etc/apt/mirror.list file.
Ubuntu users:
gksudo gedit /etc/apt/mirror.list
Kubuntu users:
kdesu kate /etc/apt/mirror.list
Ubuntu server users:
sudo nano /etc/apt/mirror.list
Here's my sample mirror.list configuration
This configuration mirrors all of Ubuntu's repositories for i386 and AMD64 architectures and stores them all in /var/spool/apt-mirror. If you don't need to mirror AMD64, just take all the deb-amd64 lines out of the above configuration and it will only download all the i386 repositories.
NOTE: Make SURE whatever partition stores your /var/spool directory has plenty of space. Trust me, you do NOT want to download 17GB and find out your partition doesn't have enough space. If you use a separate /home partition with storage capacity you want to use for apt-mirror, you can do what I did by creating a /home/apt-mirror and making /var/spool/apt-mirror link to it. That can be done with these three commands:
ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVE THE SAME SITUATION AS ABOVE!
TYPICAL USERS WONT NEED THIS
sudo mkdir /home/apt-mirror
sudo rm -Rf /var/spool/apt-mirror
sudo ln -s /home/apt-mirror /var/spool/apt-mirror
Step 3: Run apt-mirror
To have apt-mirror start downloading the repositories, run:
sudo apt-mirror /etc/apt/mirror.list
I recommend running this command overnight, as it will take several hours depending on your connection speed and what you setup to mirror. For example, my server is mirroring with the above configuration and downloaded around 35-40GB for i386 and AMD64. This took between 4-10 hours over my 10mbps cable connection.
Step 4: Install apache
For you to be able to use this local mirror normally, you will need a web server to share the directories. In this guide, I will use apache, but you may prefer to use lighthttpd or some other server.
sudo apt-get install apache2
Step 5: Setup links
We need to now link our local repository folder to our shared apache directory.
sudo ln -s /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com /var/www/archive-ubuntu
sudo ln -s /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/archive.canonical.com /var/www/archive-canonical
sudo ln -s /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/security.ubuntu.com /var/www/security-ubuntu
Step 6: Set apt to use local mirror
In this step, we'll edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace Ubuntu's repositories with our local mirror.
First, make a backup of the default sources.list.
sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
This should open a blank file wherein we will paste the following:
deb http://127.0.0.1/archive-ubuntu/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://127.0.0.1/archive-ubuntu/ubuntu gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://127.0.0.1/archive-ubuntu/ubuntu gutsy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://127.0.0.1/security-ubuntu/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://127.0.0.1/archive-canonical/ubuntu gutsy partner
NOTE: These should be 5 lines, "multiverse" does not go on a separate line.
Then press Ctrl+X then y to save and close the file.
Next, we need to update the repositories to make sure everything is working as expected.
sudo apt-get update
This should run the same as before we changed the file. Any errors will need to be addressed. Contact me if you have any errors here.
You should also use this step on other machines you want to setup to use this mirror. You will just need to replace the 127.0.0.1 with the LAN address for machines over LAN or public IP for other machines over the net.
If you have questions, comments, suggestions, feel free to post a comment, send me a message on IRC (bmk789 on freenode), or send me an email (bmk789@gmail.com).
