Hi,
I have an air gaped[1] device. ( Devuan )
How do you manage to install packages/software on off-line[1:1] device ?
I’ve heard of apt-offline
but it seem to bug and I don’t know if it’s still maintained (last release two years ago)
of course I’ve tried manually but the dependencies relations are too crazy to do that fully manually
Dependence tree (not complete even) to install for example apt-offline
├── Depends
│ ├── Depends
│ │ ├── Depends
│ │ │ ├── Depends
│ │ │ │ └── python3-dbg_3.9.2-3_amd64.deb
│ │ │ ├── libcurl4-gnutls-dev_7.74.0-1.3+deb11u14_amd64.deb
│ │ │ ├── python3-pycurl-dbg_7.43.0.6-5_amd64.deb
│ │ │ └── python-pycurl-doc_7.43.0.6-5_all.deb
│ │ ├── python3-httplib2_0.18.1-3_all.deb
│ │ └── python3-pycurl_7.43.0.6-5_amd64.deb
│ ├── iso-codes_4.6.0-1_all.deb
│ ├── python3-pysimplesoap_1.16.2-3_all.deb
│ └── python-apt-common_2.2.1_all.deb
├── python3-apt_2.2.1_amd64.deb
└── python3-debianbts_3.1.0_all.deb
Any ideas ?
Thanks.
air gaped, off-line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking) ↩︎ ↩︎
If this is for a user programs rather than system components that must be managed by apt, you could use Nix.
By its nature, it keeps track of all dependencies in a queryable format and Nix stores are actually quite portable; you can just
nix copy /nix/store/6gd9yardd6qk9dkgdbmh1vnac0vmkh7d-ripgrep-14.1.1/ --to /mnt/USB-drive/
and that will copy that store path aswell as any dependency (including transitive deps) to e.g. a USB drive.
You’d then do the inverse in the target environment to do the opposite:
nix copy /nix/store/6gd9yardd6qk9dkgdbmh1vnac0vmkh7d-ripgrep-14.1.1/ --from /mnt/USB-drive/
And then
/nix/store/6gd9yardd6qk9dkgdbmh1vnac0vmkh7d-ripgrep-14.1.1/
aswell as its entire runtime dependency tree would exist in the air-gapped system.Because Nix store paths are hermetic, that’s all you need to execute e.g.
/nix/store/6gd9yardd6qk9dkgdbmh1vnac0vmkh7d-ripgrep-14.1.1/bin/rg
.You’d obviously just adjust your
$PATH
accordingly rather than typing all of that out and typically would install this into what Nix refers to as a profile so that you have one path to add to your$PATH
rather than one for each package.I used a single package here but you could build an entire environment of many packages to your liking and it’d be the exact same as far as Nix is concerned; it’s all store paths.
You do need
/nix/
to exist and be writeable in the target environment for this to work though.🤩 Woo I didn’t know
nix
. It seem a better way to handle package !!!
But so if I have alreadyapt
that handle packages, is it compatible to use both on the same system !?Nix stores all packages in isolation from each other; as a result there are no /bin, /sbin, /lib or /usr directories and all packages are kept in /nix/store instead.
I do it manually, but I don’t have a lot of dependencies. Download the main package, install it, check the error message for the package it needs, download the new package, install the main package again… For python stuff pip download will also get the dependencies. Maybe you can use the Debian website since it lists the package dependencies and allows you to download from the website the deb files. You can probably automate with a bash script some stuff.
Switch to a distro lineage whose package manager builds in the necessary facilities? Someone’s already mentioned Nix, and Gentoo has the
--fetchonly
switch for Portage which will download (but not install) everything required for a specified package including dependencies, so you can copy all of the files to an external drive at once.