Offline Repository Mirrors

Offline repository mirrors are pointing to APT repositories, for example from Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server or Debian. After the initial setup, you can mirror all the available packages locally. They are organized by creating point-in-time snapshots of the repositories. Those snapshots can then be exported to a configured medium.

Setting Up a Mirror

First, either run the setup wizard (proxmox-offline-mirror setup), or the config mirror add command.

Tip

The quickest way to set up all relevant repositories for a Proxmox solution is to use the setup wizard. Choose the product when adding a mirror and confirm the question regarding auto-adding the Debian base repos.

Note

To be able to access and mirror a product's enterprise repository, proxmox-offline-mirror requires that both, an active product subscription key and a Proxmox Offline Mirror subscription is configured (see Setup Offline Mirror Key)

For example, to manually add a mirror entry for the Debian Bookworm security repository, the following command can be used:

proxmox-offline-mirror config mirror add \
 --id debian-bookworm-security \
 --architectures amd64 \
 --architectures all \
 --repository 'deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main contrib non-free' \
 --key-path /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/debian-archive-bookworm-security-automatic.gpg \
 --sync true \
 --verify true \
 --base-dir /path/to/mirror/base-dir

Note

The base-dir directory can be shared by mirrors for repositories that have common contents to avoid storing files more than once. For example, having a single base directory for all mirrors referencing Proxmox repositories is recommended.

Note

The all architecture is meant for architecture independent packages, not for all possible architectures. It is usually always sensible to add it in addition to the host-specific architecture.

Syncing a Mirror

To create the first (and subsequent) snapshots, the following command can be used:

proxmox-offline-mirror mirror snapshot create debian-bookworm-security

Note

Depending on the parameters used and the size of the original repository, creating a snapshot can take both time and require significant disk space. This is especially true for the initial snapshot, as subsequent ones will re-use unchanged package files and indices.

Reducing Mirror Scope

There are different mechanisms for reducing a mirror's scope (and correspondingly, the amount of traffic and disk space required to keep it synced):

  • architecture filters

  • components (as part of the repository specification)

  • package name and section filters

By default, only packages for the architectures all (see note above) and amd64 are mirrored.

Optionally, it's possible to setup filters for downloaded binary or source packages via the --skip-packages and --skip-sections options. The package filters support globbing, for example linux-image-* will skip all packages with a name starting with linux-image-. The section filters match the full value, or the value prefixed with the package's component (for example, games will match both the section games, as well as non-free/games in a packages index of the non-free component).

Some examples for packages and section filters:

  • --skip-packages 'linux-image-*' - filter Debian linux kernel image packages

  • --skip-sections 'games' - filter sections containing game packages

  • --skip-sections 'debug' - filter sections containing debug information

Please refer to https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/ for a list of Debian archive sections and their contents.

Space Management

After removing a snapshot with proxmox-offline-mirror mirror snapshot remove, a proxmox-offline-mirror mirror gc invocation is needed to trigger the garbage collection to actually remove any contents from the underlying hard link pool that are no longer needed.

Environment Variables

ALL_PROXY

When set, proxmox-offline-mirror uses the specified HTTP proxy for all HTTP(s) connections. Currently only HTTP proxies are supported. Valid proxy configurations have the following format: [http://][user:password@]<host>[:port]. Default port is 1080, if not otherwise specified.

Note

The proxy server must allow HTTP CONNECT for all ports that are used to connect to mirrors (e.g. port 80 for HTTP mirrors). For Squid, the appropriate configuration parameter is http_access allow CONNECT <acl> (http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/http_access/). By default, Squid only allows HTTP CONNECT for port 443.