Arch Linux

BoySka

Member

Registered: 2008-05-09

Posts: 25

Pacman Offline

I have a workstation which is not connected to the network, and it is frustrating how difficult is to install something.
This tool makes possible to download packages for machine X from machine Y.

It's just some lines of bash, so don't expect so much from it.
It works this way:

Step 1) at machine X, you make a tarball of /var/lib/pacman and you get machineX.tar.gz

Step 2) Then you copy it to machine Y someway: usb pen, cd... whatever.

Step 3) At machineY you have the mighty pacman-offline tool. So you write

pacman-offline machineX.tar.gz firefox

And it will sync (pacman -Sy) on the db contained in machineX, retrieve the *needed* packages to install firefox (so including not installed dependencies) and download them in a newly created directory.

Step 4) Now, the easy part: just get this directory and put it back to machineX. Now you're ready to pacman -U

At the moment the script does just the *hard part* (step #3), leaving the rest to the user (they're simple tasks). Anyway, I'd like to do a collection of tools that can do all these things.

code is at http://github.com/boyska/pacman-offline

Is someone interested to that project? I think it could be easy to make it a good, versatile tool

Heller_Barde

Member

Registered: 2008-04-01

Posts: 245

Re: Pacman Offline

seems a really cool tool.
although you can achieve a similar result with

pacman -Sp > packagelist

on the offline machine and then download the packages with the online machine. afterwards its a simple

pacman -U *.pkg.tar.gz

or am I mistaken?

cheers
Barde

BoySka

Member

Registered: 2008-05-09

Posts: 25

Re: Pacman Offline

seems a really cool tool.
although you can achieve a similar result with

pacman -Sp > packagelist

on the offline machine and then download the packages with the online machine. afterwards its a simple

pacman -U *.pkg.tar.gz

or am I mistaken?

you're right, but only if machineX's db is updated. Otherwise you'll get an out-dated list of packages.

but of course it doesn't do so much more, it just aims to be easy to use in doing this.