On Sunday, 5 May 2024 04:44:09 ACST Lew Wolfgang wrote:

Hi Folks,

Is there a way to maintain local copies of the openSUSE repositories?
Maintenance includes keeping the local repos up-to-date by downloading
only the deltas between the remote and local repos.

I know how to do this using the Red Hat "reposync" program, a part
of the yum/dnf package, but it just doesn't feel right having to
depend on Red Hat for what would appear to be core functionality.

Note:  I can't use rsync due to policy constraints.  But web ports 80
and 443 are okay.  I know, go figure...

 Do you need to maintain full copies of the repos locally, or would proxying/
caching requests to the repos for installs/updates be good enough? 

I've used apt-cacher-ng at home and in our corporate network for providing 
updates for machines that don't have outbound internet access. It caches files 
locally the first time they're requested and then serves them from the cache 
for subsequent requests. 

It works for zypper and yum as well as apt, but the mechanism is slightly 
different. For zypper and yum it's necessary to modify the repo URL to point 
to the apt-cacher-ng service on port 3142 (there are 2 documented ways do to 
that), whereas with apt it's a one-liner in a config file. The port can be 
changed if needed (e.g. to 8080 or any other arbitrary port). 

Apt-cacher-ng is available for openSUSE (including TW) but it's necessary to 
add the server:proxy repo to get it.