Reduces external traffic in a local network with multiple arch linux systems with minimal config. It replicates the structure of a full mirror without downloading the whole mirror. Clients add this in mirrorlist and pacman just works.

Install

From PKGBUILD

Currently disributed as a binary. Download the PKGBUILD and pkgstash.install, use makepkg -i to install. See Arch User Repository for more information.

From source

clone the repo from repo root

go build ./cmd/server

Binary is called pkgstash, sample config, env and service files are in deploy/

Configure and Start

Edit /etc/pkgstash/pkgstash.env and change the token to a secure one. I used openssl like so:

openssl rand -base64 64

#/etc/pkgstash/pkgstash.env

PKGSTASH_TOKEN=<paste secure token here>

start with the included systemd service

systemctl enable --now pkgstash.service

systemctl enable --now pkgstash-refresh.timer

Technical details

Go as the language. It has most of the tools necessary for a http server ins the standard library and it's performant.
Singleflight to prevent 2 clients from causing the server to fetch the same package more than once.
Pkgs are written atomically to prevent serving partial files
Use multiple mirrors for redundancy and spread the load out.
Refresh the remote db files on a schedule to enable prefetching of cached pkgs.

Roadmap

Prefetch and cache cleanup
Streaming on cache misses
cli admin tool
Custom repo
Build server
Automate builds on updated aur pkgs
- Auto approve on version bump with not other changes in PKGSBUILD
- Notify if a build needs approval
Web admin interface