Can a PPA be added to an Ubuntu repo mirror?

Question

In our college, we have mirrors of most new Ubuntu distros to save update costs. We would like to add rabbitvcs to the computers, but is available through a PPA and not the official repo. So can a PPA be added to a (private) mirror of the ubuntu repo?

PS: I would like to hear on both the technical and legal issues involved.

As far as the legal issue goes, Launchpad's PPA terms of use require that packages are distributed under a licence that is either OSI Approved, FSF Approved, or DFSG Compliant. So redistribution is fine. There should be no issue there. — andrewsomething, Feb 26 '11 at 05:27
You mirror the PPA exactly the same way you mirror the main repo. — psusi, Feb 26 '11 at 16:43
@apoorv020 whatever way you use for the main repository. A repo is a repo. — psusi, Feb 26 '11 at 22:47

score 14 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 20 '21 at 07:44

14

I am successfully using apt-mirror to mirror PPAs.

https://apt-mirror.github.io/

Simply add lines like:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/byobu/ppa/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/byobu/ppa/ubuntu precise main

To /etc/apt/mirror.list.

And then run sudo apt-mirror.

edited Jul 20 '21 at 07:44

Community

1

answered Jan 28 '12 at 17:26

Dustin Kirkland

14,608

As expected. Nicely done. – Diosney Dec 27 '15 at 16:20

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 26 '11 at 08:37

Official repo is a repo, PPA is a repo and you cannot add a repo to a repo.

The best way would be to ask everyone to add your repo in their Ubuntu installation. This way it can be pretty useful. You can mirror that repo too, such that you upload the package to the PPA, it gets mirrored in the college servers and is then available as update to everyone.

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 13 '17 at 22:29

I just spent some time doing this for OpenCPU. If all you have is the line for adding the PPA, you have to change the colon to a peroid and add launchpad.net to it.

Example, this is the PPA installation line:

add-apt-repository -y ppa:opencpu/opencpu-1.6

Inside of /etc/apt/mirror.list you would add a line like this for Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/opencpu/opencpu-1.6/ubuntu xenial main

Then you can launch apt-mirror and it will clone the PPA. For clients to use this, you would add entries to their /etc/apt/sources.list file pointing to wherever your hosting the PPA mirror.

Can a PPA be added to an Ubuntu repo mirror?

3 Answers3

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