Setting Up Local Repositories - Ubuntu 16.04 /18.04 /20.04

2. Validate that the service runs at startup:

$ sudo systemctl enable apache2

 

3. After you have checked the service is working as expected move to the default DocumentRoot Directory :

$ cd /var/www/html

 

4. Created the ubuntu sub directory 

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/ubuntu

 

5. Assign the direcotry to the appropriate owner , in this case www-data ( the user under which Apache HTTP runs ).

$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/ubuntu

 

Please note :

It is strongly recommended that the DocumentRoot or at least the ubuntu subfolder is on a filesystem belonging to a logical volume; this way we can enlarge it online, with no downtime. At the time of my testing 171.5 GiB are the absolute minimum space needed if also mirroring the src packages; so to plan for the future it is recommended to have at least 300 GiB of disk space.

 

6. Install the main tool which allows you to create a local repository -  apt-mirror, :

$ sudo apt install apt-mirror

7. If the apt-mirror package is not found refresh your package list with the following command (and then repeat step 6 

$ sudo apt update

 Now, it's time to select which repositories to mirror the local - repo server. 

8. Make a backup copy of the mirror.list configuration file 

$ sudo cp /etc/apt/mirror.list /etc/apt/mirror.list.org

9. Edit the config file using vi or nano and change the base_path to the default document root we have created earlier (/var/www/html/ubuntu)

$ vi /etc/apt/mirror.list

 

10. Unmark the lines you would like to get packages from. For example, if you would like to sync with var than erase the # symbol from the line. 

11. Copy a script into /var/www/html/ubuntu/var/

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/ubuntu/var 
$ sudo cp /var/spool/apt-mirror/var/postmirror.sh /var/www/html/ubuntu/var/

12. Remove the existing "deb sources" examples in the mirror.list configuration file and replace the with the "Deb sources" from /etc/apt/sources.list 

Create local Mirrors

Now is time to create a local mirror, keep in mind that an initial mirroring can take many hours and will probably slow down your connection. Our suggestion is to run this at night / during the weekend. 

13. To start mirroring the remote repos packages to the local server simply execute the command:

$ sudo apt-mirror

Once the clean.sh and postmirror.sh scripts are executed, the mirroring process has been completed!

 

STEP 2: Setup CronJob to update your repositories 

Now that you've created a local repository, it's important to keep it updated with all new packages. In order to do so, we will configure a sync process by using cron scheduler.

$ sudo crontab -e

 Now, edit the crontab and add the following line

00 	03 	*	 *	 *	/usr/bin/apt-mirror

 Since the sync process might take some time and resources, we might want to run it at night. Hence, this line is configured to run at 3AM. (You can easily change the numbers and do it whenever you want). 

Save and Exit. 

 

STEP 3: Setting Up Client Servers 

1. SSH your client server

2. Configure the local repository list by editing the sources.list configuration file. 

$ vi /etc/apt/sources.list

3. Specify the local repo we have created in step 1 and disable any remote one by commenting the lines. Please Note: If you do not comment the remote repos a "Release file has not been found" might occur while running the command apt update on the client.

4. Replace any string archive.ubuntu.com with our local mirror IP. 

$ sudo  sed -i.bak0 "s/archive\.ubuntu\.com/10\.10\.0\.42/g" /etc/apt/sources.list

This command will create the backup file /etc/apt/sources.list.bak0 and replace any archive.ubuntu.com string with 10.0.0.42. A further adjustment is running again sed in this way:

$ sudo  sed -i.bak1 "s/ubuntu/ubuntu\/mirror\/archive\.ubuntu\.com\/ubuntu/g" /etc/apt/sources.list

This command will create the backup file /etc/apt/sources.list.bak1 and replace any ubuntu string with ubuntu/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu. A further adjustment is running again sed in this way.

 

This is necessary as apt-mirror appends the path mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu to our base path. Here it will be created a further backup file

/etc/apt/sources.list.bak1.

 

Note: For the purpose of this tutorial we are only mirroring packages or repositories from archive.ubuntu.com; of course you can add other unofficial repositories in the mirror.list file in the server, but then you have to re-run apt-mirror there and edit on any client the sources.list file accordingly.

Update local repository index:  

Make sure the port 80 is not blocked by the client firewall and then you can run:

$ sudo apt update

You're all set !