Ubuntu Manpage: apt-move - move cache of Debian packages into a mirror hierarchy.

NAME

       apt-move - move cache of Debian packages into a mirror hierarchy.

SYNOPSIS

       apt-move [-c conffile] [-d dist] [-afqt] command

DESCRIPTION

The apt-move script is used to move a collection of Debian package files into a proper
archive hierarchy of the form $LOCALDIR/pool/... where LOCALDIR is specified in the
configuration file. It is intended as a tool to help manage the apt-get(8) file cache,
but could be configured to work with any collection of Debian packages.

Additionally, using the sync and mirror commands, you can build your own local mirror of
portions of a selected binary and/or source distribution.

Running apt-move periodically will assist in managing the resulting partial mirror by
(optionally) removing obsolete packages and creating valid local Packages.gz and
Sources.gz.

Commands
The following commands are accepted by apt-move:

get [ dir ]
This generates the master files using Packages and Sources files from the apt(8)
cache. The master files are used to keep track of what packages are available, and
where packages should be installed. If dir is specified, it will be used in lieu
of the LISTSTATE variable.

getlocal [ dir ]
This is an alias of get. It may be removed in future releases.

move Moves a collection of packages into the local mirror tree. Uses existing master
files (see get) to repair any mangling done to the package names. Any packages
that aren't listed in the master files or are obsolete will be left in the file
cache directory. Obsolete packages will also be copied into the archive but they
will be removed after the next delete operation. In the these two cases, the
package is considered to have been skipped.

delete Delete obsolete package files. Configurable through the DELETE and MAXDELETE
settings in the /etc/apt-move.conf file (see the CONFIGURATION section below). It
also deletes any index files of packages that are no longer in the archive. This
means that you can simply delete packages from the archive without affecting its
consistency as long as you run the delete command afterwards.

packages
Builds new local versions of Packages.gz and Sources.gz files.

fsck Rebuilds all index files used to make Packages and Sources files and reprocess all
packages in the archive by calling movefile on them. Use this if you are upgrading
from an old version (<< 4.2) of apt-move.

update This is an alias, equivalent to 'get move delete packages'. This is the preferred
method for moving package files from your cache into a local mirror.

local This is an alias, equivalent to 'move delete packages'.

localupdate
This is an alias for update. It may be removed in future releases.

mirror This command automatically runs get, then uses /usr/lib/apt-move/fetch and apt-
get(8) to download any packages missing from your mirror. The downloaded files
will be installed into the repository using move. Finally, it runs packages and
exits. See the DIST and PKGTYPE settings in /etc/apt-move.conf. Before using this
command, you need to set up a $LOCALDIR/.exclude file containing patterns to
exclude unwanted files from your mirror. See the SAMPLE.exclude file for an
example. See also the Exclude file section of NOTES below. Note that this command
will only mirror packages for the architecture that you are running on. It will,
however, mirror all source packages.

sync Similar to the mirror function, but only gets the packages that are currently
installed on your system. It uses dpkg(8) --get-selections to find out what files
to download. It will skip any files that match one of the patterns in the
$LOCALDIR/.exclude file (if it exists). sync will get the latest versions of the
packages, regardless of the version currently installed on your system (think about
it).

exclude
This command is used to test your $LOCALDIR/.exclude pattern file. It will go
through the master lists and print any file that matches one of the patters in
$LOCALDIR/.exclude. This will show you exactly what files you have EXCLUDED from
your mirror. The -t (test) flag has no affect on this command. This uses your
existing master files, and does not require an internet connection.

movefile files...
This command is similar to move. Instead of moving files from FILECACHE, it will
move the files specified on the command line.

copydir directory...
This command is similar to movefile. Instead of moving files from the command
line, it will copy .deb files from the specified directory. This is useful for
copying the pool of a Debian CD to an apt repository.

listbin [ mirror | sync | repo ]
This command prints a list of packages which may serve as the input to mirrorbin or
mirrorsrc. If the argument is mirror or sync, it will produce the same lists that
the mirror and sync commands use. If the argument is repo, the list produced will
contain the packages that are currently in the apt-move repository.

mirrorbin
This command will fetch the list of packages specified on the standard input, and
place them into the archive in the same way as mirror does.

mirrorsrc
This commands acts like mirrorbin, except that it fetches source packages instead
of binary ones.

Options
The following options are available from the command line:

-a Process all packages. By default, commands like listbin and mirrorbin only process
packages that differ in version between the apt-move repository and the archive
being mirrored. This option causes all packages to be considered even if the apt-
move repository already contains the latest version.

-c conffile
Use conffile as the configuration file instead of /etc/apt-move.conf.

-d dist
Use dist as the default suite instead of the value of DIST from the configuration
file.

-f Forces deletion of files even when the percentage of files to delete exceeds the
MAXDELETE setting. This is useful if apt-move aborts with an error saying that too
many files would be deleted, and you want to delete the files anyway. (Use with
caution.) If you get this error, using -ft will show you the complete list of
files, so you can verify them before you use -f.

-q Suppresses normal output. This option is useful when apt-move is used in a non-
interactive script.

-t Makes a 'test run' and reports what WOULD be done for option but does not modify
any of the cache or mirror files.

CONFIGURATION

Before using apt-move, edit the /etc/apt-move.conf file to match your local setup. Always
remember to use the test parameter after any change in your configuration to make sure it
will work like you want it to. You may also want to set the DELETE option to no to turn
off file deletes until everything else is working successfully.

The file is read as a Bourne shell script. So you must obey the syntactical rules of
sh(1). In particular, values with spaces in them must be quoted with single or double
quotes.

The following settings are recognized by apt-move (shown here with their defaults):

APTSITES="debian.midco.net non-us.debian.org"
Set this to the names of sites in your /etc/apt/sources.list that you wish to
mirror. The value /all/ refers to all non-file URIs.

LOCALDIR=/mirrors/debian
This is the full (absolute) path to your debian directory (the top of your local
mirror).

DIST=stable
This is the default suite assigned to packages when the Release file is missing.
It does not have any effect on whether a suite is stored in the archive.

PKGTYPE=binary
Set this to your choice of: binary, source or both to tell the mirror, sync and
movefile which type(s) of files to get.

FILECACHE=/var/cache/apt/archives
The directory where your local cache of packages are. The default will work for the
apt-get(8) packages, unless you've changed the configuration in /etc/apt/apt.conf.

LISTSTATE=/var/lib/apt/lists
The directory to your local cache of Packages files. The default will work for the
apt-get(8) packages, unless you've changed the configuration in /etc/apt/apt.conf.

DELETE=no
Determines whether obsolete packages (packages not listed in the master file, or
packages that have been superceded in the repository) are to be removed.

MAXDELETE=20
Maximum percentage of files apt-move is allowed to delete during a normal run.
Anything exceeding this will produce an error and abort the script. I added this
as a precaution so that you won't lose your entire mirror when a new distribution
is released. You can override this (with caution) using the -f parameter with
apt-move.

COPYONLY=no
If this is set to yes, then move and movefile will copy instead of move. That is,
the originals will be left alone.

PKGCOMP=gzip
This should be set to a space-separated list of compression formats that apt-move
should provide when generating Packages and Sources files. The possible values are
none, gzip and bzip2. With the current apt package you should include at least
none, as otherwise apt will complain about missing files.

CONTENTS=no
If this is set to yes, then packages will generate Contents files.

GPGKEY=
If this is set to non-empty string, then packages will sign generated Release files
with the specified key. You must install gnupg before enabling this option.

For the sync and mirror commands to function correctly, you need to list your apt-move
repository at the top of /etc/apt/sources.list as a file URI.

FILES

       /usr/bin/apt-move
              The script.

       /etc/apt-move.conf
              Configuration file for the script.

       /usr/share/man/man8/apt-move.8.gz
              The manpage.

       /tmp/MOVE_*
              The temporary files created at runtime.

       /usr/lib/apt-move/fetch
              Utility  to  fetch  files  just like apt-get install -d.  Except that no dependency
              analysis is done.

       .apt-move/*.{binary, source}.local
              Put entries of local packages here.  The  fields  are  ``package  priority  section
              source version task'' for the binary file, and ``package priority section version''
              for the source file.  The version field may be set to a single dash to refer to the
              latest  version  in  the  archive.  Blank lines and lines beginning with a hash are
              ignored.

NOTES

Exclude file
The mirror command uses a file in the $LOCALDIR/ directory called '.exclude' which
contains exclude patterns that are applied against the files to be mirrored. These
patterns were created with the following limitation: they must work the same with with
grep(1), after any '*' characters are removed. Unless you're careful setting this up,
you'll get unexpected results. Run 'apt-move -t mirror' first, to make sure you're
getting the results you intended. Another way to verify your exclude file is the use the
exclude command for apt-move to print a list of files your are excluding from your mirror.
See the sample
.exclude file (SAMPLE.exclude) for an example of an .exclude file.

Mirroring
The apt-move mirror and sync commands do not test for available disk space. The current
potato (main binary) distribution is over 1Gb in size. Add the sources to that and it can
eat up the space on a partition really fast. I would advise you to put your mirror
somewhere other than the root partition. Set up your exclude file and run apt-move -t
mirror and examine the result.

Code names
Since apt-move gets the suite names from Release files, which usually use the names
stable, testing and unstable, the suites in the repository are named accordingly. You can
simulate the code names by creating symbolic links in the dists directory. For example,
in order to make testing equivalent to sarge, you could run ln -s testing
$LOCALDIR/dists/sarge. Alternatively, you could delete the testing subdirectory and run
ln -s sarge $LOCALDIR/dists/testing. This will cause future executions of the get
operation to use sarge whenever it sees testing in the Release file.

DIAGNOSTICS

apt-move may exit with one of the following error messages:

Could not read configuration.
apt-move could not find the /etc/apt-move.conf file. Run the install script.

Could not create directory.
For some reason, a necessary directory could not be created.

You failed to select a distribution.
You did not configure a DIST setting in /etc/apt-move.conf.

You specified an invalid package type.
You can only use binary, source or both for the PKGTYPE setting.

No master files exist!
You need to run apt-ve with the get command at least once in order to create the
master files which determine where packages are to be installed.

bc calculation returned invalid result
apt-move uses the bc(1) program to determine when the number of files to delete
will exceed the MAXDELETE setting in apt-move.conf. If you get this error, make
sure that MAXDELETE is set to a number in the range of 1 to 100, without the %
sign. Otherwise you need to report this as a bug.

Too many files to delete!
apt-move will report this error if the number of files to be deleted exceeds the
MAXDELETE setting in apt-move.conf. You need to study the output to determine if
this is normal (in which case you can override this using the force parameter), or
if its due to some drastic change on the mirror site (like a new release) or
possibly due to a partial download of the master Packages.gz or Sources.gz file.

Your current mirror directory is incompatible...
You have just upgraded from an old version of apt-move. Update your configuration,
then run apt-move fsck and finally remove .apt-move/ancient.

Could not read Release files.
apt-move could not read the release files needed to build the master files. Make
sure you have run apt-get update and try again.

Failed to remove original files.
apt-move could not remove the original copies of files that have just entered the
apt-move archive. Make sure that you have permission to delete those files.

Please remove $LOCALDIR/backup.
You must remove LOCALDIR/backup before running the fsck command.

Unknown DIST setting.
The value of DIST must match the Archive field in the Release file of the
distribution that you are trying to mirror.

Cannot find index files for APTSITES.
apt-move could not find any index files for the get operation. You should either
run apt-get update, or run apt-move with -f if only the *.local files have been
changed.

BUGS

       The  exclusion  system was designed prior to the introduction to the package pools.  Hence
       its content still relates to the old structure of the Debian archive.  This  is  confusing
       and it should be replaced with a new exclusion system.

       The  DIST  variable does not control what is actually downloaded by the fetch utility.  It
       should have a similar effect to that of apt-get -t.

AUTHOR

       Michael Merten <mikemerten@yahoo.com>

       Herbert Xu <herbert@debian.org>