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.

  1. air gaped, off-line
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking) ↩︎ ↩︎

  • Atemu@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • SpongeB0B@programming.devOPEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      🤩 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.

  • Tenkard@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    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.