OzanH

If you have a few number Debian or Ubuntu machines, you may want to save some bandwidth and speed up package installations. This can be achieved with the help of approx, which is an HTTP-based proxy server for Debian-style package archives. This tutorial is based on Debian 8 (jessie).

Firstly, install the approx package

apt-get install approx

After installation, you need to edit the configuration file of approx that is /etc/approx/approx.conf. My configuration is like this:

debian          http://ftp.tr.debian.org/debian/
security        http://security.debian.org/

Change the debian mirror to your favorite mirror. List of Debian mirrors

There are some parameters for approx which can be seen with man 5 approx.conf command. I did not change any parameter but you may need it. I use approx for my custom debian builds with Simple-CDD so I don't need to change my /etc/apt/sources.list file. If you need, change your sources.list file like this to forward the apt requests to approx.

sources.list

deb http://127.0.0.1:9999/debian jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://127.0.0.1:9999/security jessie/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://127.0.0.1:9999/debian jessie main contrib non-free

You will save bandwidth and time. Enjoy.