How install a package/program with all the dependencies tree to an offline devices ?

Hi,

I have an air gaped[^1] device. ( Devuan )

How do you manage to install packages/software on off-line[^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

Any ideas ?

Thanks.

[^1]: air gaped, off-line
\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)

16 comments

I'd just mirror the whole repo. All of Debian main for a single architecture is less than a terabyte. I imagine yours is similar.
- and then I guess it can even be trimmed somewhat. delete the development packages, look through and filter the unneeded larger ones, ...

You might want to consider using Docker. You can build an image on your normal machine, export it as a file onto a USB stick, and then transfer it to your air-gapped machine, import it there. Then running it is just docker run --rm my_image
You can do this for a whole bunch of programs in one image, or a separate image for each one.

If an appimage is available you could probably just move it across on a USB drive.
- indeed .appimage are an amazing thing as they do not require any special runtime or installation process !
  \ I guess I will have to do my own .appimage of software that do not provide them

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
undefined

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:
undefined

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 already apt 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.
  
  Yes, nix complements your system's package manager, but doesn't replace it

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.

I found this, maybe it is a suitable solution? https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/408348
- Thank you very much @connaisseur@feddit.org
  I have tried
  bash
  
  apt-get -o Dir::Cache::archives="/to/path" install --download-only apt-offline
  But it downloaded only the .deb of apt-offline and not all the dependence tree. Most probably because this machine have them already.
  now, remain to force to download also all the dependency tree even if already installed...
  
  You could setup a new, empty VM and use it as a download only machine for packages, although it makes the process a bit more complicated.

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.

16 comments