On Debian-based distros, when an app is available as a DEB or an AppImage (that doesn’t self-update), but no APT repository, PPA or Flatpak, the only option is to manually download each update, and usually manually check even whether there are updates.
But, what if those would be upgraded at the same time as everything else using the tools you’re familiar with ?
dynapt is a local web server that fetches those DEBs (and AppImages to be wrapped into DEBs) wherever those are, then serves these to APT like any package repository does.
I started building it a few months ago, and after using it to upgrade apps on my computers and servers for some time, I pre-released it for the first time last week.
The stable version will come with a CLI wizard to avoid this manual configuration.
Feedback is welcome :)
If I’d decide to implement something like this, I’d consider two options: local repo with file:// scheme or custom apt-transport. HTTP server is needless here. (But I’ll never do this because I prefer to rebuild packages myself if there’s no repo for my distro.)
local repo with
file://scheme
With that, I couldn’t trigger a download when apt update is ran, I could only do a cron, i.e. a delay, that I do not want.
custom apt-transport
I thought about that, but found no documentation on how to do it. If you have any, I’m interested.
Even just finding documentation on how to generate DEBs and APT repository metadata files was very hard.
It is documented in libapt-pkg- (/usr/share/doc/libapt-pkg-doc/method.html/index.html).
In an APT package OMG 😂
I found an online version though, which I would never have found through my search engine (and on a site that doesn’t even support HTTPS) 😅
Looks like difficult reading too 😭
Thanks anyway.
Neat! Thanks for sharing!
Is that autotiling on cinnamon? Didn’t know it could do that
I like it. Wonder if this could be retooled to work on rpm-ostree systems, because any layered packages installed from RPM files have the same limitation of needing to be manually upgraded.
Sorry to ask, but isn’t this basically the same thing as apt-cacher-ng?
Sorry to ask
Don’t be. I would love to know that an existing and more experienced program does what mine does.
I’ve been looking for it myself for a long time before deciding to build it.
isn’t this basically the same thing as apt-cacher-ng?
Here’s what I’m reading :
Apt-Cache-ng is A caching proxy. Specialized for package files from Linux distributors, primarily for Debian (and Debian based) distributions but not limited to those.
A caching proxy have the following benefits:
- Lower latency
- Reduce WAN traffic
- Higher speed for cached contents
+------------+ +------------+ +------------+ | Apt Client | <------+ Apt Cache | <------+ Apt Mirror | +------------+ +------------+ +------------+
So, not the same thing.
It locally mirrors existing repositories containing existing packages, it doesn’t locally create a new repository for new packages from standalone DEBs.
OK yeah, I wasn’t sure if it had a way to collect debs from other sources. I’ve been using it for years to locally cache the standard Debian repos so I don’t need to re-download packages every time I update my various servers and VMs, but I haven’t really tried using it for anything beyond that.
