mailto(apt@packages.debian.org) manpage(apt.conf)(5)(5 Dec 1998)(apt)() manpagename(apt.conf)(configuration file for APT) manpagedescription() bf(apt.conf) is the main configuration file for the APT suite of tools, all tools make use of the configuration file and a common command line parser to provide a uniform environment. When an APT tool starts up it will read bf(/etc/apt/apt.conf), then read the configuration specified by the bf($APT_CONFIG) environment variable and then finally apply the command line options to override the configuration directives, possibly loading more config files. The configuration file is organized in a tree with options organized into functional groups. Option specification is given with a double colon notation, for instance em(APT::Get::Assume-Yes) is an option within the APT tool group, for the Get tool. Options do not inherit from their parent groups. Syntacticly the configuration language is modeled after what the ISC tools such as bind and dhcp use. Each line is of the form quote(APT::Get::Assume-Yes "true";) The trailing semicolon is required and the quotes are optional. A new em(scope) can be opened with curly braces, like: verb(APT { Get { Assume-Yes "true"; Fix-Broken "true"; }; }; ) with newlines placed to make it more readable. Lists can be created by opening a scope an including a single word enclosed in quotes followed by a semicolon. In general the sample configuration file in em(/usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf) is a good guide for how it should look. All of the APT tools take a -o option which allows an arbitary configuration directive to be specified on the command line. The syntax is a full option name (APT::Get::Assume-Yes for instance) followed by an equals sign then the new value of the option. Lists can be appended too by adding a trailing :: to the list name. manpagesection(The APT Group) This group of options controls general APT behavoir as well as holding the options for all of the tools. startdit() dit(bf(Architecture)) System Architecture; sets the architecture to use when fetching files and parsing package lists. The internal default is the architecture apt was compiled for. dit(bf(Ignore-Hold)) Ignore Held packages; This global options causes the problem resolver to ignore held packages in its decision making. dit(bf(Immediate-Configure)) Disable Immedate Configuration; This dangerous option disables some of APT's ordering code to cause it to make fewer dpkg calls. Doing so may be necessary on some extremely slow single user systems but is very dangerous and may cause package install scripts to fail or worse. Use at your own risk. dit(bf(Force-LoopBreak)) Never Enable this option unless you -really- know what you are doing. It permits APT to temporarily remove an essential package to break a Conflicts/Conflicts or Conflicts/Pre-Depend loop between two essential packages. SUCH A LOOP SHOULD NEVER EXIST AND IS A GRAVE BUG. This option will work if the essential packages are not tar, gzip, libc, bash or anything that those packages depend on. dit(bf(Get)) The Get subsection controls the bf(apt-get(8)) tool, please see its documentation for more information about the options here. dit(bf(Cache)) The Cache subsection controls the bf(apt-cache(8)) tool, please see its documentation for more information about the options here. dit(bf(CDROM)) The CDROM subsection controls the bf(apt-cdrom(8)) tool, please see its documentation for more information about the options here. enddit() manpagesection(The Acquire Group) The bf(Acquire) group of options controls the download of packages and the URI handlers. startdit() dit(bf(Queue-Mode)) Queuing mode; bf(Queue-Mode) can be one of bf(host) or bf(access) which determins how APT parallelizes outgoing connections. bf(host) means that one connection per target host will be opened, bf(access) means that one connection per URI type will be opened. dit(bf(Retries)) Number of retries to perform. If this is non-zero apt will retry failed files the given number of times. dit(bf(Acquire::Source-Symlinks)) Use symlinks for source archives. If set to true then source archives will be symlinked when possible instead of copying. True is the default dit(bf(http)) HTTP URIs; http::Proxy is the default http proxy to use. It is in the standard form of em(http://[[user][:pass]@]host[:port]/). Per host proxies can also be specified by using the form http::Proxy::<host> with the special keyword em(DIRECT) meaning to use no proxies. The em($http_proxy) environment variable will override all settings. Three settings are provided for cache control with HTTP/1.1 complient proxy caches. bf(No-Cache) tells the proxy to not used its cached response under any circumstances, bf(Max-Age) is sent only for index files and tells the cache to refresh its object if it is older than the given number of seconds. Debian updates its index files daily so the default is 1 day. bf(No-Store) specifies that the cache should never store this request, it is only set for archive files. This may be usefull to prevent polluting a proxy cache with very large .deb files. Note: Squid 2.0.2 does not support any of these options. One setting is provided to control the pipeline depth in cases where the remote server is not RFC conforming or buggy (such as Squid 2.0.2) Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth can be a value from 0 to 5 indicating how many outstanding requests APT should send. dit(bf(ftp)) FTP URis; ftp::Proxy is the default proxy server to use. It is in the standard form of em(http://[[user][:pass]@]host[:port]/) and is overriden by the ftp_proxy environment variable. To use a ftp proxy you will have to set the ftp::ProxyLogin script in the configuration file. This entry specifies the commands to send to tell the proxy server what to connect to. Please see em(/usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf) for an example of how to do this. The subsitution variables available are $(PROXY_USER), $(PROXY_PASS), $(SITE_USER), $(SITE_PASS), $(SITE), and $(SITE_PORT). Each is taken from it's respective URI component. Several settings are provided to control passive mode. Generally it is safe to leave passive mode on, it works in nearly every environment. However some situations require that passive mode be disabled and port mode ftp used instead. This can be done globally, for connections that go through a proxy or for a specific host (See the sample config file for examples) dit(bf(cdrom)) CDROM URIs; the only setting for CDROM URIs is the mount point, cdrom::Mount which must be the mount point for the CDROM drive as specified in /etc/fstab. It is possible to provide alternate mount and unmount commands if your mount point cannot be listed in the fstab (such as an SMB mount). The syntax is to put "/cdrom/"::Mount "foo"; within the cdrom block. It is important to have the trailing slash. Unmount commands can be specified using UMount. enddit() manpagesection(Directories) The bf(Dir::State) section has directories that pertain to local state information. bf(lists) is the directory to place downloaded package lists in and bf(status) is the name of the dpkg status file. bf(Dir::State) contains the default directory to prefix on all sub items if they do not start with em(/) or em(./). bf(xstatus) and bf(userstatus) are for future use. bf(Dir::Cache) contains locations pertaining to local cache information, such as the two package caches bf(srcpkgcache) and bf(pkgcache) as well as the location to place downloaded archives, bf(Dir::Cache::archives). Like bf(Dir::State) the default directory is contained in bf(Dir::Cache) bf(Dir::Etc) contains the location of configuration files, bf(sourcelist) gives the location of the sourcelist and bf(main) is the default configuration file (setting has no effect) Binary programs are pointed to by bf(Dir::Bin). bf(methods) specifies the location of the method handlers and bf(gzip), bf(dpkg), bf(apt-get), bf(dpkg-source), bf(dpkg-buildpackage) and bf(apt-cache) specify the location of the respective programs. manpagesection(APT in DSelect) When APT is used as a bf(dselect(8)) method several configuration directives control the default behavoir. These are in the bf(DSelect) section. startdit() dit(bf(Clean)) Cache Clean mode; this value may be one of always, auto, prompt and never. always will remove all archives after they have been downloaded while auto will only remove things that are no longer downloadable (replaced with a new version for instance) dit(bf(Options)) The contents of this variable is passed to bf(apt-get(8)) as command line options when it is run for the install phase. dit(bf(UpdateOptions)) The contents of this variable is passed to bf(apt-get(8)) as command line options when it is run for the update phase. dit(bf(PromptAfterUpdate)) If true the [U]pdate operation in dselect will always prompt to continue. The default is to prompt only on error. enddit() manpagesection(How APT calls DPkg) Several configuration directives control how APT invokes dpkg. These are in the bf(DPkg) section. startdit() dit(bf(Options)) This is a list of options to pass to dpkg. The options must be specified using the list notation and each list item is passed as a single arugment to dpkg. dit(bf(Pre-Invoke), bf(Post-Invoke)) This is a list of shell commands to run before/after invoking dpkg. Like bf(Options) this must be specified in list notation. The commands are invoked in order using /bin/sh, should any fail APT will abort. dit(bf(BPre-Install-Pkgs)) This is a list of shell commands to run before invoking dpkg. Like bf(Options) this must be specified in list notation. The commands are invoked in order using /bin/sh, should any fail APT will abort. Apt will pass to the commands on standard input the filenames of all .deb files it is going to install, one per line. dit(bf(Run-Directory)) APT chdirs to this directory before invoking dpkg, the default is /. dit(bf(Build-Options)) These options are passed to dpkg-buildpackage when compiling packages, the default is to disable signing and produce all binaries. enddit() manpagesection(Debug Options) Most of the options in the bf(debug) section are not interesting to the normal user, however bf(Debug::pkgProblemResolver) shows interesting output about the decisions dist-upgrade makes. bf(Debug::NoLocking) disables file locking so apt can do some operations as non-root and bf(Debug::pkgDPkgPM) will print out the command line for each dpkg invokation. bf(Debug::IdentCdrom) will disable the inclusion of statfs data in CDROM IDs. manpagesection(EXAMPLES) bf(/usr/doc/apt/examples/apt.conf) contains a sample configuration file showing the default values for all possible options. manpagesection(FILES) /etc/apt/apt.conf manpageseealso() apt-cache (8), apt-get (8) manpagebugs() See http://bugs.debian.org/apt. If you wish to report a bug in bf(apt-get), please see bf(/usr/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt) or the bf(bug(1)) command. manpageauthor() apt-get was written by the APT team <apt@packages.debian.org>.