Arch Linux

Whoracle

Member

Registered: 2010-11-02

Posts: 176

Pacman pull-through cache

So, I'm running a small homelab with a bunch of arch machines, along with 2 desktops and 2 notebooks. I'm providing AUR packages via my own little repo on one of the VMs. The Desktops/Notebooks share a set of packages (mostly), and the VMs in the homelab share another set of packages (again, mostly).

Since both sets are usually Syu'd at the same time I was thinking of hosting some kind of pull-through cache for the packages, to speed up the installation. Running a full-fledged mirror is, of course, overkill - not in terms of space in my homelab, but in terms of bandwidth wasted at the upstream mirrors. So, anybody got suggestions on how to achieve a kind of centralized cache for pacman packages, something akin to what LANCache can do for Steam, only for pacman?

Way I envision it is: Host requests a package, asks the cache server. If cache hit, serve locally. If cache miss, fetch from upstream and cache result. Bonus points for configurable cache refresh - say "refresh all the packages you currently have every 6 hours" or so.

Edit: And of course, as soon as I post the question, I find https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Packag … oxy_server. Well, I'm going to try that out, but in the meantime, other suggestions also welcome.

Last edited by Whoracle (2025-11-18 13:18:39)

teckk

Member

Registered: 2013-02-21

Posts: 552

Re: Pacman pull-through cache

That can be done multiple ways.

You can share a machines pacman cache directory with all other machines on the LAN. Or you can copy pacmans cache to all other machines.

I do it the manual way. I use the machine with the most packages installed on it and pacman -Syu to a temp dir.

pacman -Syuw --cachedir "$temp_dir"

Then start a web server on that directory. (python will do this, or other)

webserver "$temp_dir" --port 8100

Then get everything from that server to the pacman cache on each machine.

wget -P "$pac_cache" -r -nd <IP:PORT>

Then update that machine. All of the packages are already in pacmans cache directory.

pacman -Syu

At the end, when I get back around to the first machine, I move everything from the temp dir to pacmans cache and pacman -Syu on it.

Al machines have the same software, and the cache is backed up to multiple machines.

And of course, I use an update script for that.

I also updated grub last thing on that script each update, according to the EFI paths on each machine.

No special software to maintain. Just a bash script.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 70,349

Re: Pacman pull-through cache

--cachedir and nfs or you could try whether https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/httpfs2 still works to skip the local copy if you want to go w/ a http server.

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NuSkool

Member

Registered: 2015-03-23

Posts: 283

Re: Pacman pull-through cache

I use pacoloco set up in an nspawn container, then point all my installs to it using CacheServer, as the first entry in the mirrorlist.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Packag … che_server

Last edited by NuSkool (Yesterday 19:22:47)

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Whoracle

Member

Registered: 2010-11-02

Posts: 176

Re: Pacman pull-through cache

I was eyeing Pacoloco, since it gets the cache warming and house keeping bonus points, but for now I went with plain NGINX, since I'm running that to serve my own repo anyways. Gonna leave this open over the weekend and then mark it solved.