repo-sync

A universal Linux package repository synchronization tool. It mirrors remote repositories into a local directory tree, preserving the upstream layout so the result can be served directly to package managers.

Supported repository types, named by --type when a run has to be limited to some of them:

• rpm — yum/dnf repositories (repodata/repomd.xml), including plain-text mirrorlist and metalink URLs with failover between mirrors.
• deb — apt repositories, both standard (dists/<suite> with a shared pool/) and flat layouts, including Acquire-By-Hash population.
• arch — pacman repositories (<name>.db), including detached package signatures and companion metadata (.files, .db.tar.gz, .links.tar.gz).
• apk — Alpine Linux repositories (APKINDEX.tar.gz with packages beside it).

Usage

repo-sync sync [flags] <url> [<url> ...] <destination-directory>

The last argument is always the destination directory; every argument before it is a repository or mirrorlist URL, synchronized one after the other.

Each repository is identified by its own metadata, so no type has to be given: an upstream publishing both yum and apt repositories is mirrored in one run. --type limits which formats are accepted, and is repeatable; a run limited to a single type synchronizes every URL as that type rather than identifying it, which is what a mirrorlist or metalink URL needs.

A configuration file is optional: without one the built-in defaults apply. When one is present its crawler section supplies the defaults for every command, so workers, prune_grace, request_timeout, user_agent, missing_mode, and missing_retries are shared by the sync commands and the server. The global flags --config-path, --log-level, --user-agent, and --request-timeout override the configuration for any command.

# Mirror one repository. The URL path is copied below the destination, so
# this produces ./mirror/repos/CentOS/7/EA4/.
repo-sync sync https://example.com/repos/CentOS/7/EA4/ ./mirror

# Trim the first two path components: ./mirror/7/EA4/.
repo-sync sync --trim 2 https://example.com/repos/CentOS/7/EA4/ ./mirror

# No path copying at all: the repository lands directly in ./mirror.
repo-sync sync --flat https://example.com/repos/CentOS/7/EA4/ ./mirror

# Multiple repositories in one run.
repo-sync sync https://example.com/repos/a/ https://example.com/repos/b/ ./mirror

# Crawl directory listings for repositories, at most 4 levels deep.
repo-sync sync --discover --depth 4 https://example.com/repos/ ./mirror

# A pacman repository. The database name is discovered from the directory
# listing, or by probing URL path segments when listings are disabled.
repo-sync sync https://example.com/archlinux/core/os/x86_64/ ./mirror

# An Alpine repository is one arch directory; discovery syncs every arch
# of a release/repo tree in one run.
repo-sync sync https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.24/community/x86_64/ ./mirror
repo-sync sync --discover --depth 1 https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.24/community/ ./mirror

# A Fedora-style metalink URL; mirrors are used in preference order. Nothing
# can be crawled or probed through a metalink, so the type is given. The
# mirrors' paths differ, so --flat keeps the destination stable.
repo-sync sync --type rpm --flat 'https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-9&arch=x86_64' ./mirror/epel9

# An apt suite. Pool files resolve against the archive root, producing
# ./mirror/debian/dists/bookworm/ and ./mirror/debian/pool/.
repo-sync sync https://deb.example.com/debian/dists/bookworm ./mirror

# Limit an apt mirror to specific components and architectures. Include
# "source" as an architecture to keep source indexes.
repo-sync sync --component main --arch amd64,source https://deb.example.com/debian/dists/bookworm ./mirror

# Limit a crawl to one format when an upstream publishes several.
repo-sync sync --type rpm --discover https://repo.example.com/ ./mirror

Discovery

--discover treats each URL as a directory index and crawls it for repositories, at most --depth levels down. A directory holding repository metadata is mirrored as a whole and is not crawled further, so a vendor archive is mirrored by pointing one run at its root.

--exclude keeps parts of that tree out of the crawl. Each pattern is a glob, repeatable, and matched against the entry name wherever it appears in the tree; a pattern containing a slash is matched against the path below the crawled URL instead, pinning it to one place, and a leading slash anchors it to that URL. An excluded directory is never listed, so nothing below it is mirrored either.

--include-file mirrors loose files the crawl passes on its way, which no repository's metadata lists — signing keys, release notes, and packages published outside a repository. Each pattern is a glob, repeatable, and matched by name or by path on the same rules as --exclude, so '*.rpm' takes loose packages from anywhere in the tree while '/*.rpm' takes only those beside the crawled URL itself. Only files in directories that are not repositories are considered: a repository's own files come from its metadata, and pruning there would remove anything else. These files carry no published checksum, so they are revalidated against their modification time rather than re-downloaded, and --prune never removes them.

# Mirror MySQL's yum and apt repositories in one run, skipping the
# distributions this mirror does not serve, and keeping the signing keys
# and loose packages published outside the repositories.
repo-sync sync --discover --depth 6 \
  --exclude sles --exclude 'fc*' --exclude docker \
  --include-file '*.rpm' --include-file '*.deb' --include-file 'RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql*' \
  http://repo.mysql.com/ ./mirror

Missing upstream files

Published repositories are not always complete. An index outlives the packages it references, a vendor withdraws a build, or a mirror is caught mid-publish, and a package the metadata lists comes back as a 404. Abandoning a whole repository over one file is rarely what a mirror wants, so --missing selects what happens instead:

• retry (the default) mirrors the rest of the repository, then reports the run as failed while the file is still worth retrying. Once the same file has been missing for --missing-retries consecutive runs — three by default — it is recorded as a known absence in the repository and no longer fails the run. It is still requested every run, so an upstream that publishes it again is picked up without intervention, and a file that is served again drops out of the records and starts its budget over.
• fail stops the repository at the first missing file, which is the strictest reading of an incomplete upstream.
• ignore skips missing files and never fails the run.

The distinction the retry mode draws is between an upstream having a bad day and a package that is genuinely gone: a transient wave of 404s stays loud, while an absence that survives several runs stops being news. Records are kept in the repository itself, in .repo-sync-missing.json — at the suite directory for apt, so suites sharing a pool keep their own — and are never served or pruned.

# Accept a package as gone after it has been missing for five runs.
repo-sync sync --missing retry --missing-retries 5 http://repo.example.com/apt/dists/wheezy ./mirror

This covers the packages an index lists. A repository's own entry-point metadata — repomd.xml, InRelease/Release, the pacman database, APKINDEX.tar.gz — is always required: without it there is nothing to mirror. Optional companion files, such as detached signatures and the index variants a Release file lists but the upstream does not serve, were never failures to begin with.

Every run reports Number of files missing upstream in its summary, and a repository that synchronized despite tolerated absences carries a missing count in its log line.

Trace files

A public mirror is expected to say something about itself: who runs it, where it is, and when it last synchronized. Debian archives established a convention for this — a file at project/trace/<host> inside the archive — and downstream mirrors and mirror checkers read it. --trace publishes one into every repository synchronized, and the mirror server publishes one into every repository it crawls when the trace section is enabled.

repo-sync sync --trace --trace-maintainer 'Jane <jane@example.com>' \
  https://example.com/repos/CentOS/7/EA4/ ./mirror

Mon Jul 27 20:31:58 UTC 2026
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:31:58 +0000
Date-Started: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:29:14 +0000
Creator: repo-sync 0.1.0
Running on host: mirror.example.com
Maintainer: Jane <jane@example.com>
Repository type: rpm
Upstream-mirror: https://example.com/repos/CentOS/7/EA4
Total bytes received: 5726208
Total time spent syncing: 164
Average rate: 34915 B/s

Upstream-mirror records the mirror actually fetched from, which for a mirrorlist or metalink is the one that answered rather than the list's own URL — the reason a trace is written here rather than by whatever schedules the sync, which cannot know that.

The file is placed in the repository directory, or for apt at the archive root, where the convention puts it. It is registered as part of the repository, so --prune never removes it even when the repository and the trace share a directory. --dry-run reports what would change without writing one.

Everything but the dates and transfer figures comes from configuration, and each field has a matching flag: --trace-host (defaults to the system hostname), --trace-maintainer, --trace-sponsor, --trace-country, --trace-location, and --trace-throughput. Setting them in the trace section of a config file avoids repeating them on every run; --trace and --no-trace then switch tracing on or off per run. Fields left unset are omitted from the file rather than written empty.

Upstream's own traces are mirrored alongside, so project/trace/ names every mirror the content passed through and a reader can follow the chain back to the archive it originated from. A trace upstream publishes under this mirror's own host name is skipped: that file describes a different mirror, and the one written here has to win. Upstreams that publish no traces, or that do not serve a directory index for them, are not an error; nothing is copied and the run continues.

Traces work the same on the mirror server, whose crawls are concurrent: each crawl accounts for its own transfer rather than reading the shared counters, so the totals in each trace describe that crawl alone. Every completed crawl republishes the repository's trace, so the timestamps track how current the cached copy is.

Mirror server

repo-sync server runs a caching mirror in front of upstream repositories. Repositories are discovered from client requests and then kept synchronized in the background, so package managers can be pointed straight at it.

repo-sync server --config-path ./config.yaml

Without --config-path the config is read from ./config.yaml, ~/.config/repo-sync/config.yaml, or /etc/repo-sync/config.yaml. See config.example.yaml for a documented configuration covering the listener, domains, mounts, and crawler tuning. The server needs at least one domain and one mount; the sync commands do not.

To run it as a systemd service, install /etc/repo-sync/config.yaml and:

repo-sync service install
repo-sync service start

service also accepts stop, restart, status, and uninstall. The installed unit runs repo-sync server as a notify service, restarts on failure, and reloads its configuration on systemctl reload repo-sync.

Building

make

The build stamps the binary with the contents of the VERSION file plus the git commit and build date, shown by repo-sync --version. A plain go build also works but reports the version as dev.

Testing

make test

The suite is hermetic: fixture repositories for every supported format (rpm, deb, arch, apk) are generated in temp directories and served over local HTTP, so no network access is required.