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I have a private Debian repository setup with a few custom built packages (along with other official Debian packages). All my machines have this repository(only) configured in /etc/apt/sources.list. I want to know if there is a way to serve certain packages to certain machines.

For example - machine1 should be able to connect to the repository but should be able to download package1 and package2 only. machine2 should not be able to upgrade package1 even if a new version is available in the repository.

I know how to do the above on the client side - by running (or not running) the appropriate commands on machine1 and machine2. I want to automate this - I was planning to run a cronjob on those machines to do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every day but only the packages intended for them should be installed/upgraded.

I have looked up online for weeks but couldn't find anything useful. Is this even doable?

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You won't be able to do this with a single repository, because the package index (the Packages file) is common to all clients. Well, actually, you can, if you serve the package index dynamically (e.g. with a CGI or other server script). But I don't think there are any read-made tools for that, you'd have to write your own generator (it wouldn't be very complicated, mind).

The simplest approach would be to put each set of separately-available packages in its own repository, and allow each client to access only the repositories containing the packages that they must be able to access.

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  • Thanks for the response. I guess I can't go the cgi route as the client machines are accessing the repository over ssh using the following format: deb ssh://repo-owner@repo.server.com:/home/repo-owner/debian/ ./ (debian-administration.org/articles/513). Having separate repositories is not an option either as there are loads of client machines and package versions. Any other ideas you can think off?
    – Debianuser
    Aug 16, 2011 at 11:28

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