Installing Apt-P2P

Make sure you have all the dependencies first. Then, you'll need to download the code, as it has not been packaged yet. You can find the code in the Git repository.

Configuring APT for Apt-P2P

Once you have downloaded Apt-P2P, you need to update your /etc/apt/sources.list file to point APT towards Apt-P2P. This is done by adding localhost and the port that Apt-P2P is running on to the beginning of your hostname. For example, if you had a line like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

and the Apt-P2P client is using the default Apt-P2P port (9977), then you would modify the line to become:

deb http://localhost:9977/ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

Other Initial Setup

Before you start to use Apt-P2P, you may want to check the client configuration file apt_p2p_conf.py to update it for your setup. In particular, you may want to configure a different PORT option, and then configure your router/NAT to forward that port (both TCP and UDP) to your machine (see the FAQ for more info).

Using Apt-P2P for the First Time

Before you can start downloading using Apt-P2P, you need to update APT (apt-get update) so it sees the new Apt-P2P lines in the sources.list file. Apt-P2P is now ready to download packages for you. Any future requests to APT (e.g. via an apt-get install foo or apt-get dist-upgrade) will be downloaded by Apt-P2P.