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Creating a private apt repository with reprepro

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Article from ADMIN 16/2013

By Georg Schönberger

A private repository is useful if you want to distribute your own software packages to Debian and Ubuntu machines in a controlled manner. The reprepro tool makes it easy.

The seemingly simple and practical task of distributing software you develop yourself can turn out to be time consuming and complex. On Debian and Ubuntu, keeping packages in a repository facilitates installations and upgrades for the user. The reprepro tool [1] helps administrators establish and manage a repository. It provides an easy option for setting up a repository and installing packages. A web server uses the HTTP protocol to distribute the packages to the users. The authenticity of the packages is ensured by GPG signatures.

An Ubuntu server can be transformed into a repository in a few steps. All the required software components are in the official Ubuntu repositories, and no third-party software is needed. Simply type

sudo apt-get install reprepro

to set up Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the install. Afterward, useful information on the reprepro package can be found in the default documentation path, /usr/share/doc/reprepro/, such as short-howto.gz, which provides a brief introduction to the configuration.

The following example uses a separate repository user account for the configuration. The conf folder serves as a central location for the configuration files. The most important file, distributions, specifies the distribution, architecture, and so on for which the repository is used (Listing 1).

Listing 1

distributions

$ pwd
/home/repository
$ mkdir -p packages/conf
$ vi packages/conf/distributions
Origin: TKmon
Label: tkmon
Codename: precise
Suite: stable
Architectures: i386 amd64 source
Components: main optional
SignWith: 0B8738CA
$ vi

...

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