Tag: repository

Install aptly under Ubuntu 18 LTS with nginx serving the packages and the first steps

This article is how to install aptly software, which offers easy Debian repository management.
First, few words for aptly and what tasks are really simple to do:

  • Mirror an existing (remote) repository. Make a local copy of Debian or Ubuntu repostories for all your internal infrastructure.
  • Create your own repositories
  • Create snapshots of repositories and mirrors.
  • Merge repositories
  • Make diff between repositories (in fact snapshots of repositories, but you may make a mirror of an repository and then make a snapshot and then make a diff with some other snapshot to see the changes between the different repositories or the time the snapshots are made).
  • Remove or add individual packages from official mirrored repositories.
  • Use api calls to manage the repositories. HTTP REST API is still in development, but a big part of it works.

For more information you may visit the official documentation page – https://www.aptly.info/doc/overview/

We are going to install the aptly and despite it could be used to serve the repository files we will use the Nginx web server for this work. Nginx is a more fast and reliable web server with easy installation of SSL certificates for our repositories.
The aptly is included in official Ubuntu repositories in the component universe, but at present, it is 2 to 3 versions behind the stable one from the aptly site, so we are going to use their repository to install aptly. Still, if you do not want to use
Keep on reading!

aptly – ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution ./mytest-stable not found

Sometimes the user manual may be unclear and you came here searching for a solution of dropping a published repository.
We have aptly version: 1.3.0 and here is the right syntax to remove a published repository.

First list the published repositories and reverse the “/” replacing it with space

The commands will be:

aptly publish list
Published repositories:
  * <name-distribution>/<release> [amd64] publishes {main: [xenial-<name>]: Some description}
aptly publish drop -force-drop <release> <name-distribution>

“name-distribution” is the “http://aptly.example.com/[name-distribution]” in the URL. For example, the repository URL of myrepo is “http://aptly.example.com/myrepo” and the name-distribution is “myrepo”.

A real world example

root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish list
Published repositories:
  * myrepo/stable [amd64] publishes {main: [xenial-myrepo]: Stable myrepo packages}
  * test/test [amd64] publishes {test: [test]: Test repo}
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish list --raw
myrepo stable
test test

We want to remove “myrepo/stable”:

root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop -force-drop stable myrepo
Removing /etc/aptly/.aptly/public/etc/dists...
Removing /etc/aptly/.aptly/public/etc/pool...

The published repository has been removed successfully.
root@srv-aptly:~#

The wrong syntax

You might have tried it that’s why you came here:

root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish list           
Published repositories:
  * myrepo/stable [amd64] publishes {main: [xenial-myrepo]: Stable myrepo packages}
  * test/test [amd64] publishes {test: [test]: Test repo}
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish list --raw
myrepo stable
test test
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop myrepo
ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution ./myrepo not found
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop myrepo stable
ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution stable/myrepo not found
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop myrepo-stable
ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution ./myrepo-stable not found
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop -force-drop myrepo-stable
ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution ./myrepo-stable not found
root@srv-aptly:~# aptly --config="/etc/aptly/.aptly.conf" publish drop -force-drop myrepo stable
ERROR: unable to remove: published repo with storage:prefix/distribution stable/myrepo not found
root@srv-aptly:~#