At work, I install and re-install Debian and Ubuntu machines all the time. Like 20 times a day. On each run, they typically pull down 150 packages. Needless to say, it would speed things up immensely if these packages were pull down from a local cache rather than from an official mirror.
It turns out, this is really easy to do using the apt-cacher-ng
package.
On the machine where you want the APT cache:
# apt-get install apt-cacher-ng
That's it. By default, it listens on all network interfaces and will accept connections for any IP.
On each of your Debian & Ubunu machines
My machine running apt-cacher-ng has the IP 192.168.56.1. The only
thing I have to do to make all the other machines use it, is to create
this file:
# cat > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy <<EOF
Acquire::http::proxy "http://192.168.56.1:3142";
EOF
All apt-get, synatpic and apt command should now download
packages through your APT cache proxy.
It works!
The same apt-cacher-ng instance can serve both package caches for
Debian and Ubuntu and any release of the two.
You can have a look at the cached files here:
Maintenance
There's a web based report and administration interface included in the package. Head over to http://192.168.56.1:3142/acng-report.html and you're presented with some nice statistics as well as some buttons to perform maintenance tasks.
For regular maintenance, though, a daily cron job is set up for you that should take care of expiring old packages.
/etc/cron.daily/apt-cacher-ng
$ find /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng -name "*.deb"
If you're installing machines through Virtualbox
You can serve the APT cache from your host computer and let your guest
VMs use it to speed up their installation. To get fast communication
between the host and guest machines, I've set up an additional
interface on the VirtualBox guest using the "Host only adapter" option
(vboxnet0).
On the guest, I then added a secondary interface to communicate on this host-only network. On Debian based machines, this meant:
# cat >> /etc/network/interfaces <<EOF
auto enp0s8
iface enp0s8 inet static
address 192.168.56.101
EOF
Then a mere ifup command to bring it up:
# ifup enp0s8
The interface name enp0s8 may be different on your machine. Use
ifconfig -a to list all interfaces.
You can then check the connectivity from the virtual machine to the
server running apt-cacher-ng through the 192.168.56.x network by
doing:
$ telnet 192.168.56.1 3142
telnet> GET /
If you get a response from the cache (that you're query was wrong), you're good to go.
