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jshield

Member

Registered: 2010-02-15

Posts: 22

[SOLVED] Requiring pacman to authenticate against a repository

What is the recommended way to get pacman to authenticate against a web server hosting a private pacman repository?

I ask this because I maintain a number of packages that contain prearmed licenses for certain software that I use.
I am transitioning to hosting that repository on a potentially public server, as such I need to lock down access.

Cheers,

Last edited by jshield (2018-06-05 12:52:16)

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: [SOLVED] Requiring pacman to authenticate against a repository

I'm not sure what the recommended approach is, but one way would be to switch your XferCommand in pacman.conf to the wget variant and then create the following /root/.netrc file...

machine example.com login <username> password <password>

I've never tried this myself but it should work

Another option would be to skip using a web server and http altogether if it's going to be private access only, just use something like sshfs to mount the remote repo then use a file:/// declaration in your pacman config.

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: [SOLVED] Requiring pacman to authenticate against a repository

Yeah, the builtin download agent does not support authenticated download, but external XferCommand works fine with whatever downloader you would like.

BTW I suggest using curl --netrc-file

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

jshield

Member

Registered: 2010-02-15

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Requiring pacman to authenticate against a repository

I forgot about .netrc, it appears that pacman supports it out of the box possibly due to it being linked against libcurl.

Cheers for that.

@Slithery I contemplated using sshfs, and I may yet still, however I don't have ssh enabled on the server, as I manage it through the console provided by the VPS provider, and there is an agent that pulls jobs from my CI server to build packages.