Ubuntu – How to get apt to use a mirror close to me, or choose a faster mirror

Official Ubuntu archive for USA is located at address: us.archive.ubuntu.com

The CD repository and software repository are two distinct components (they even have separate Launchpad pages: cdmirrors and archivemirrors). Therefore, mirroring them are two distinct tasks. Further, while the various flavours have different folders on the CD repository, they share a software repository. So you can selectively mirror the images per flavour, but not the software. For the software repository, you can selectively mirror based on:

• release (trusty, precise, etc.)
• architecture (amd64, i386, etc.)
• package type (binary [deb] vs source [deb-src])
• channels (trusty, trusty-updates, trusty-backports, etc.)
• sections (main, multiverse, etc.)

To mirror the software repository, use apt-mirror.

apt-mirror is configured using /etc/apt/mirror.list. It has a format very similar to sources.list. The configuration file installed by the package has a few commented out options which list their defaults. If you wish, you can uncomment and change them.

To mirror a repository, you need to add a line to mirror.list like you would for sources.list:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main multiverse restricted universe

The default is to mirror only the host's architecture, so if you're on a 64-bit Ubuntu, only amd64 will be mirrored. You need to add another line of the form:

deb-i386 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main multiverse restricted universe

And for source packages:

deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main multiverse restricted universe

If you're looking for a reasonably complete mirror, these lines would be the minimum (I would also recommend -updates channel):

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main multiverse restricted universe
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main multiverse restricted universe
deb-i386 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main multiverse restricted universe
deb-i386 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main multiverse restricted universe

Finally, you need to add a clean line so that packages no longer available in the repository are filtered for removal:

clean http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

Say your variables are thus (the defaults):

set base_path    /var/spool/apt-mirror
set mirror_path  $base_path/mirror
set skel_path    $base_path/skel
set var_path     $base_path/var
set cleanscript $var_path/clean.sh

Then:

• The repository will be mirrored to $mirror_path/parent-hostname/directory (so /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu)
• The clean.sh (which will be a set of rm commands to delete obsolete packages and directories) will be /var/spool/apt-mirror/var/clean.sh.
• The logs will go to /var/spool/apt-mirror/var.

The apt-mirror package installs a cron job (/etc/cron.d/apt-mirror), which you should edit to enable (by uncommenting the line containing /usr/bin/apt-mirror). You should also add a cron job for running clean.sh (I run it weekly).

Of course, you should replace http://us.archive.ubuntu.com./ubuntu with whichever mirror you prefer.