Have apt-get install packages from a specific location

Question

I have a bunch of .deb packages that I would like to install. I want to keep them within a specific folder so that I can easily access them. There are about 200 packages in total that all depend on each other. So, can I use apt-get to install this program from a specific folder? In other words, I want to add this folder to the apt-get list so that it will search that folder when looking for the packages to install.

I'm using ubuntu

Cheers

Answer 1

You can install a webserver on your system like apache or nginx (smaller and maybe more suited for something as simple as this) and create a packages directory in there.

sudo apt-get install nginx

The default content dir should be:

/usr/share/nginx/html

Create create some folders for specific architectures or just for the one you use (amd64 for 64 bit or i386)

/urs/share/nginx/html/debs/amd64

You can throw all your packages in there and start the server with

sudo service nginx start

Then create a package list (open a terminal and move to you debs folder) by running this.

dpkg-scanpackages amd64 | gzip -9c > amd64/Packages.gz

Now add the repository to the /etc/apt/sources.list file this can be done manually,

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add

deb http://localhost/debs/ amd64/

to the bottom then just run

sudo apt-get update

And you should be able to install from your repository.