Setup Apt-Mirror on Ubuntu

I found information from a variety of websites but I used Pradeep’s article the most. Most of the articles were for Ubuntu 22.04 or older and the last time I did this was more than 6 years ago, I knew my old method (if I remembered) probably wouldn’t work.

Some Reasons Why

The last time I did this, my main reason was I had multiple systems and it seemed to make sense to have a central server for all the systems to pull packages from. This can be especially useful if you have a number of systems.

Another reason would be if you have a limit internet connection or you have systems that you don’t want access to the internet. I have some family members with data caps and it is easier to send them a harddisk and they can have a local repo for their systems that are not on the internet.

Some Reasons Not To

The main reason I also stopped back then was while I had a handful of systems, my local repo was downloading packages that I didn’t use and by the end, I didn’t reduce my bandwidth. Having data caps suck.

Another reason you might not want to is if you need multiple architectures, then you need to download each one. Again this could be useful if you have a number of systems.

Finally, you use multiple different distros as you would need to do this for each one and apt-mirror really only works with Ubuntu and Debian (it may work with other apt based distros).

Installing and Setting up Apt-Mirror

I would suggest not using apt-mirror as it is not really supported and have a number of issues when I tried using it with Ubuntu 24.04. The current maintainers are looking for new ones to replace them. Instead I would suggest apt-mirror2 It was created this year and have been actively updated. There are a number of ways to install it since it is a Python program. Some of the ways are:

• Docker
• pip/pipx
• deb package

I installed the deb package using the instructions at their website. Note anytime I see curl script.sh | sudo bash, I always download the script, inspect it before using it.

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/nE0sIghT/apt-mirror2/script.deb.sh > script.deb.sh
sudo bash script.deb.sh

After the repo is added, sudo apt-get install apt-mirror2 to install. To use it will be apt-mirror.

I updated /etc/apt/mirror.list, the following way:

############# config ##################
#
# set base_path    /var/spool/apt-mirror
set base_path     /var/www/html/ubuntu/
#
# 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  <running host architecture>
# set postmirror_script $var_path/postmirror.sh
# set run_postmirror 0
set nthreads     20
set _tilde 0
#
############# end config ##############

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble main restricted universe multiverse
deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb-src-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports main restricted universe multiverse



clean http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

Make sure you have around 400GB free. Now just run sudo apt-mirror. I would suggest after verifying, setup a cronjob to run every day.

Setup Apache

> sudo apt install -y apache2
> sudo systemctl enable apache2
> sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/
> sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/ubuntu
> sudo ufw allow 80

You should be able to go to http://your-host/ubuntu/.

Setup to Use Local Repository

Now just need to update /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources to:

Types: deb
URIs: http://your-host/ubuntu/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu 
Suites: noble noble-updates noble-backports
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg

Types: deb
URIs: http://your-host/ubuntu/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suites: noble-security
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg

Now when you sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade, it will now by from your local repository.

Next Steps

For now, I am going to keep using my local repository at least until the end of the year. I will be providing a offline snapshot for some of my relatives who have limited internet/data caps. Thankfully my data cap is large enough that I don’t even come close, so that is no longer a concern for me.

If I decide to have some of my systems stay on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS but have some go to 24.10, then I will stop since it won’t make sense with the current systems I have.