Deprecated!

Use the new offical repository instead.

This unofficial repository will be supported until April 30, 2021, after which time the repository will be unavailable.

There will also be periodic brownouts (see brownouts.txt for dates) during which attempting apt-get update will return 503 Service Unavailable, to give advance notice before the repo goes permanently offline.

About

HashiCorp provides Debian packages for Vagrant, but they don't provide a repository so you have to download the packages and reinstall them manually every time there's an update. The feature request to add a repository is not a particularly high priority for them, so as a public service I made a repository and set it up at vagrant-deb.linestarve.com.

Originally, I was using Aptly to generate the repository. However, this required downloading and serving the deb package, which was annoying because I have a fairly small disk on my server and the packages were taking up an awful lot of room.

This version generates the repository directly from the HashiCorp releases page and provides redirects to the actual packages. This has a number of benefits:

• I can publish every version of Vagrant, not just the ones that fit on my disk.
• Package files will be downloaded directly from HashiCorp, alleviating concerns about tampering.
• Increased integrity verification: the SHA256 in the Packages file comes directly from their API, and the signature of the SHA256SUMS file is now checked against the HashiCorp GPG key.

Development

The code is intended to be run in a Docker container. You will need to make a GPG key and export it as signing.private.key; it will be embedded in the generated Docker image.

To run:

docker build -t vagrant-deb .
docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/public_html/:/app/public_html/ -v $(pwd)/cache/:/app/cache/ vagrant-deb

This will create a cache/ folder (see below) as well as a public_html/ folder to be served. The public_html/ folder will also contain redirects-{amd64,i386}.conf files which should be included in the Nginx configuration, to publish the repository's pool.

Code Overview

This program creates all of the repository files from scratch, without using any of the usual helper programs. This is because they all expect that you have a package and want to publish it yourself; since I don't want to download the packages this won't work. The documentation on the Debian repository format will probably be very helpful in trying to understand how all of the pieces fit together.

update.sh is the main script, which handles orchestrating all of the various pieces. It delegates to various Python scripts to actually generate the files, then handles compressing, signing, and so on. It avoids touching files that haven't changed, so that they can be cached and don't need to be re-downloaded. It has four main steps:

1. Create various folders and download releases.json
2. Update the files for each architecture.
3. Update the Release files for the repository.
4. Update index.html with the latest version and update time.

build-packages.py generates a Packages file for each architecture, as well as the redirects file for that architecture's /pool/. It leans heavily on releaseinfo.py, which provides various library routines for extracting information about individual Vagrant versions. (See the comments in that file for details on each of the functions.)

build-release-checksums.py generates the checksum portion of the Release file.

index.tpl is a template for index.html; it contains various placeholders which envsubst will replace during the update process.