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Switching from approx to apt-cacher-ng
######################################
:date: 2016-07-17 16:30 +0530
:slug: approx_to_acng
:tags: apt, approx, apt-cacher-ng, debian
:author: copyninja
:summary: Brief notes on my switch from approx to apt-cacher-ng
After a long ~5 years (from 2011) journey with approx I finally wanted
to switch to something new like apt-cacher-ng. And after a bit of
changes I finally managed to get apt-cacher-ng into my work flow.
Bit of History
==============
I should first give you a brief on how I started using approx. It all
started in MiniDebconf 2011 which I organized at my Alma-mater. I met
Jonas Smedegaard here and from him I learned about approx. Jonas has a
bunch of machines at his home and he was active user of approx and he
showed it to me while explaining the *Boxer* project. I was quite
impressed with approx. Back then I was using a 230kbps slow INTERNET
connection and I was also maintaining a couple of packages in
Debian. Updating the pbuilder chroots was time consuming task for me
as I had to download multiple times over slow net. And approx largely
solved this problem and I started using it.
5 years fast forward I now have quite fast INTERNET with good
FUP. (About 50GB a month), but I still tend to use approx which makes
building packages quite faster. I also use couple of containers on my
laptop which all use my laptop as approx cache.
Why switch?
===========
So why change to apt-cacher-ng?. Approx is a simple tool, it runs
mainly with inetd and sits between apt and the repository on
INTERNET. Where as apt-cacher-ng provides a lot of features. Below are
some listed from the apt-cacher-ng manual.
* use of TLS/SSL repositories (may be possible with approx but I'm notsure how to do it)
* Access control of who can access caching server
* Integration with debdelta (I've not tried)
* Avoiding use of apt-cacher-ng for some hosts
* Avoiding caching of some file types
* Partial mirroring for offline usage.
* Selection of ipv4 or ipv6 for connections.
The biggest change I see is the speed difference between approx and
apt-cacher-ng. I think this is mainly because apt-cacher-ng is threaded where as approx
runs using inetd.
I do not want all features of apt-cacher-ng at the moment, but who knows in
future I might need some features and hence I decided to switch to
apt-cacher-ng over approx.
Transition
==========
Transition from approx to apt-cacher-ng was smoother than I
expected. I had to change my /etc/apt/sources.list to use the actual
repository URL.
.. code-block:: sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental main
I had to add a *01proxy* configuration file to */etc/apt/apt.conf.d/*
with following content.
.. code-block:: conf
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://localhost:3142/"
And thats it apt will transparently use apt-cacher-ng as caching proxy
server. It is also possible to specify proxy in the sources.list
directly in below format
.. code-block:: sources.list
deb http://localhost:3142/deb.debian.org/debian unstable main
But it looks ugly to me so I preferred the transparent proxy approach.
Usage with pbuilder and friends
-------------------------------
To use apt-cacher-ng with pbuilder you need to modify /etc/pbuilderrc
to contain following line
.. code-block:: sh
MIRRORSITE=http://localhost:3142/deb.debian.org/debian
Usage with debootstrap
----------------------
To use apt-cacher-ng with debootstrap, pass MIRROR argument of
debootstrap as `http://localhost:3142/deb.debian.org/debian`.
Conclusion
==========
I've now completed full transition of my work flow to apt-cacher-ng
and purged approx and its cache.
Though it works fine I feel that there will be 2 caches created when
you use transparent and explicit proxy using localhost:3142 URL. I'm
sure it is possible to configure this to avoid duplication, but I've
not yet figured it. If you know how to fix this do let me know.
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