Introduction

Without having an amazing internet connection and using virtual machines, it quickly becomes tedious to wait ages to download the same packages for all these VMs. So I looked for a solution to have a kind of cache specifically for apt.

I found happiness with apt-cacher-ng which, from what I’ve read, is the most complete solution available today.

Installation

As usual, it’s simple:

  aptitude install apt-cacher-ng

My server has the IP 192.168.100.1. If you want to modify some small options, I invite you to look at the file /etc/apt-cacher-ng/acng.conf.

Then restart the service.

Configuration

This part is fairly easy, as we’ll tell the apt service to use a proxy. We’ll set it up on both the server and clients:

  Acquire::http { Proxy "http://192.168.100.1:3142"; };

Then we update everything:

  aptitude update

Usage

By default, there’s a small graphical interface that allows you to update, import, verify, manage expiration, etc. The address is: http://192.168.100.1:3142/acng-report.html

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Last updated 31 Aug 2010, 07:51 CEST. history