Tag: apt

Mirror a PPA repositories using aptly – PHP (ppa:ondrej/php)

This is a simple example of how to mirror a PPA repository to a local server. The Ubuntu PPA to mirror is ppa:ondrej/php, which offers the user different PHP version generally not available in the Ubuntu installation. Of course, the user should be very careful about adding PPA repositories, because they are exactly what the abbreviation stands for Personal Package Archives.

If you want to know how to install and a brief description of what is aptly you may want to read our previous article – Install aptly under Ubuntu 18 LTS with Nginx serving the packages and the first steps

What we are going to do – this is what you need to have a mirror of an external application repository:

  1. Install aptly in Ubuntu 18 LTS
  2. Create a mirror in aptly
  3. Create a snapshot of the mirror created before
  4. Publish the snapshot to be used in other servers.

and at the last step there is an example how to use the mirror in your local machines.

STEP 1) Install aptly in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

As mentioned already you may follow our article on the subject – Install aptly under Ubuntu 18 LTS with Nginx serving the packages and the first steps. The following steps are based on this installation!
The aptly home directory is in “/srv/aptly”. We use the “aptly” user and change to it to manipulate the aptly installation.
Change the user to aptly, because under this user the mirror process will happen.

root@srv ~ # su - aptly
aptly@srv:~$

STEP 2) Create a mirror in aptly.

Prepare the keys (aptly needs to have the Ubuntu keys in its trustedkeys keyring):

aptly@srv:~$ gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring trustedkeys.gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 4F4EA0AAE5267A6C
gpg: requesting key E5267A6C from hkp server pool.sks-keyservers.net
gpg: key E5267A6C: public key "Launchpad PPA for Ond\xc5\x99ej Sur�" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

Here we’ve used the method to obtain the key from a GPG KEY server, but the key can be downloaded directrly from the original repository as suggested in the error message below.
If you are not sure where to download the key you could always just try to create the mirror ( in fact, this is in STEP 3) ) and get the error for missing key and how to obtain the key:
Keep on reading!

Ubuntu AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘SSL_ST_INIT’

If you install libraries with

pip

command you might find yourself in the following situation:

root@srv:~# pip
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    from pip import main
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 13, in <module>
    from pip.exceptions import InstallationError, CommandError, PipError
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/exceptions.py", line 6, in <module>
    from pip._vendor.six import iteritems
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/__init__.py", line 64, in <module>
    vendored("cachecontrol")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/__init__.py", line 36, in vendored
    __import__(modulename, globals(), locals(), level=0)
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/CacheControl-0.11.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl/cachecontrol/__init__.py", line 9, in <module>
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/CacheControl-0.11.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl/cachecontrol/wrapper.py", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/CacheControl-0.11.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl/cachecontrol/adapter.py", line 3, in <module>
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/requests-2.9.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl/requests/__init__.py", line 53, in <module>
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/urllib3-1.13.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl/urllib3/contrib/pyopenssl.py", line 54, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL/__init__.py", line 8, in <module>
    from OpenSSL import rand, crypto, SSL
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/OpenSSL/SSL.py", line 124, in <module>
    SSL_ST_INIT = _lib.SSL_ST_INIT
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSL_ST_INIT'

Keep on reading!

apt-mark – upgrade with the exception of certain packages

If you are in a situation when you want to upgrade your system, but do not want to upgrade a certain software in it you can just instruct apt not to upgrade these packages with:

apt-mark hold <package name(s)>

Here is how you can block updating 4 packages – ca-certificates, firefox, ghostscript, linux-firmware. First we update and upgrade and you can see there is no packages to keep back, and then we use apt-mark to “hold” package “linux-firmware” and ca-certificates, firefox, ghostscript at once. Initiating apt upgrade again will give you “The following packages have been kept back:” and it will include all packages, which will not be upgraded (it will include dependencies, which require some of the blocked packages).
Keep on reading!