pkgstash

A sparse caching pacman mirror

Motivation

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.

Quick Start

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

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

Usage

Set your pacman mirrorlist to point at your server and use pacman like Normal. Update mirror urls, mirrored repos in /etc/pkgstash/pkgstash.toml to suit your needs.

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
Initial usage streams downloads to multiple clients concurrently from one upstream request
Pkgs are written atomically to prevent serving partial files
Use multiple mirrors for redundancy and spread the load out
Sync the cache on a schedule, includes refreshing databases, prefetching cached pkgs, and cleaning out old pkgs

Roadmap

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

Contributing

clone the repo from repo root

go build ./cmd/server

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

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