Pacshare is a utility that works with Arch Linux's pacman to enable sharing of packages on a local network. It does not require a central server, but rather uses a peer to peer system. It uses Avahi to publish and discover peers. Pacshare has 2 components: a server, and a client.
This is a http server which shares the contents of your pacman CacheDir
directory (default /var/cache/pacman/pkg,) and publishes it's self with Avahi.
When installed using the Arch package, you can configure the server by editing
/etc/conf.d/pacshare.conf, and start and stop the server using rc.d pacshare. Add pacshare to the DAEMONS list in /etc/rc.conf to start the
server on boot.
For development or testing purposes, you can run the server using the
pacshare-server command.
The pacshare client is used as a pacman XferCommand. Enable it by adding the
following to /etc/pacman.conf:
XferCommand = /usr/lib/pacshare-xferclient %u %o
The client will first try download packages from pacshare peers, and if none of the peers have the package, then it will download the package from the repo.