Posted by kgfullerton on Mon 23 Jan 2006 at 14:10
Maybe, like me, you've got more than one Debian box on your network - either at home or at work and you want to keep them up to date with apt but are on a slow link or metered bandwidth? If so, apt-proxy could be the answer for you.
apt-proxy is a Python based daemon that caches all apt requests that go through it, and stores a copy of the files locally, so you only need to download a copy of the .deb via apt once.
Installation is simple - just run
apt-get install apt-proxyon the machine you want as your proxy server. After installation is complete you'll have a daemon listening on port 9999.
Packages downloaded are stored in /var/cache/apt-proxy by default, but this and many other options, including the servers to use to download from, can be changed in the config file /etc/apt-proxy/apt-proxy-v2.conf - you can change the port and the interface that apt-proxy listens on.
The only change left is to change your /etc/apt/sources.list on all Debian machines and change them to look at http://$APT_PROXY_MACHINE:9999/debian.
Now, the next apt-get update and apt-get upgrade should be fast for the rest of the machines on your network.
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):
This article is copyright 2006 kgfullerton - please ask for permission to republish or translate.