Debian – Increasing Size Limit for /var/cache/apt/archives

aptcachedebian

I have 2 systems running Debian at home and I am trying to minimize the bandwidth use while upgrading the packages. How can I increase the size limit of the cache, so that I could just copy the packages over LAN? (currently they get removed too quickly)

Best Answer

The size limit is controlled by the apt option APT::Periodic::MaxSize. You can display your current value using the following command:

apt-config dump | grep Periodic

To set the size, edit or create the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99local-archive and any of the following lines:

APT::Periodic::MaxSize "<size_in_MiB>";
APT::Periodic::MaxAge "<days>";
APT::Periodic::MinAge "<days>";

See /etc/cron.daily/apt for comments on available options, and the transition from APT::Archives::*. (Ubuntu 14.04 ships /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20archive which sets APT::Archives::MaxSize. When they transition to APT::Periodic in that file, it will matter that you put your local changes in a file with a higher number.)

This sets the maximum size of the cache in MiB. If the cache is bigger, cached package files are deleted until the size requirement is met (the biggest packages will be deleted first).

Make sure to do this on all machines that mount the directory.

Related Solutions

Memoize (cache) for command-line programs

There are so many cases where what you want won't work that you won't find a generic tool that gives really good results:

Commands that access files that aren't on the command line. (locate myfile)
Commands that access the network. (wget http://news.example.com/headlines)
Commands that depend on the time. (date)
Commands that have random output. (pwgen)
…

If you handle the task of deciding which commands to apply the tool on, then what you want is a build tool: a tool that runs commands if their output is not up to date. The venerable make won't be very nice: you have to define the dependencies manually, in particular you need to carefully separate caches for different commands and manually revoke caches if you change the command, and you need to store each cache in a separate file, which is inconvenient. One of the many alternatives may be more up to the task, perhaps SCons which supports both checksum- and timestamp-based dependency analysis, has a caching mechanism on top of that, and can be tweaked by writing Python code.

Make Debian Apt Cache .deb Files in /var/cache/apt/archives/

Create a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01keep-debs file with the following content:

Binary::apt::APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages "true";

Your *.deb should be kept in /var/cache/apt/archives/* directory.

Or use it as option to keep the debs files for some selected packages.

 apt -o APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages="true" install some_package.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Memoize (cache) for command-line programs

Make Debian Apt Cache .deb Files in /var/cache/apt/archives/

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