This program was made in order to solve a common issue where one wants to download an apt package with all it's dependencies on a non linux computer connected to the internet, and later install it in an offline environment.
The reasons I chose not to use apt-offline:
- It is required to be installed on both machines.
- It requires a file to be transfered from the offline machine to the online one and then back.
I wanted a solution that requires only one file transfer, from the online machine to the offline one.
- fully cross-platform
- downloads all dependencies of a package
- single tar.gz file to move to offline machine
- generated install.sh script in the tar.gz file to allow for easy install
- prebuilt binaries for quick use on any machine
- no external dependencies or libraries required
single package
pyapt git
multiple packages
pyapt git openssl
no recommended
pyapt --no-recommended git
include packages marked as required or important
pyapt --with-required git
keep updates between uses or keep all downloads
pyapt --keep-update git
pyapt --keep git
This program requires a sources.list file and searches for it in the current directory.
You can use --sources-list to specify one explicitly.
pyapt --sources-list ./sources git
This program parses a sources.list file and uses it to resolve the package registry to use.
example sources.list
# deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20230227T000000Z bullseye main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main
# deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20230227T000000Z bullseye-security main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main
# deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20230227T000000Z bullseye-updates main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main
After finding a registry it gets it's index files and builds a full index in the form of an in-memory dictionary. The following files will be downloaded using the example list:
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/InRelease
http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/dists/bullseye-security/InRelease
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye-updates/InRelease
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/binary-all/Packages.xz
http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/dists/bullseye-security/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz
http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/dists/bullseye-security/main/binary-all/Packages.xz
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye-updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz
http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye-updates/main/binary-all/Packages.xz
Using this dictionary it can find all the dependencies of a requested package and download them from the registry.
After downloading all the packages, it creates a 'Package' file with all the metadata of the downloaded packages, this file is required for apt to recognize the package files. The install script then adds a temporary file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d named pyapt.list which specifies a new source, the local files.
Afterwards it updates packages according to the new list, without updating any other source, and then you can just use 'apt install package' to install the package as usual