pacserve
========

**pacserve - serve pacman cache and redirect via avahi service**

By default every [Arch Linux](https://www.archlinux.org/) installation
downloads its package files from online mirrors, transferring all the
bits via WAN connection.

But often other Arch systems may be around that already have the files
available on local storage - just a fast LAN connection way. This is
where `pacserve` can help. It uses [Avahi](http://avahi.org/) to find
other instances and get the files there if available.

Requirements
------------

To compile and run `pacserve` you need:

* [avahi](http://avahi.org/)
* [libmicrohttpd](http://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/)
* [curl](http://curl.haxx.se/)
* [darkhttpd](http://dmr.ath.cx/net/darkhttpd/)
* [nss-mdns](http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns/)
* [markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) (HTML documentation)

`Arch Linux` installs development files for the packages by default, so
no additional development packages are required.

Build and install
-----------------

Building and installing is very easy. Just run:

> make

followed by:

> make install

This will place an executable at `/usr/bin/pacredir`,
documentation can be found in `/usr/share/doc/pacserve/`.
Additionally systemd service files are installed to
`/usr/lib/systemd/system/` and avahi service files go to
`/etc/avahi/services/`.

Usage
-----

Make sure [multicast-
DNS](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Avahi#Hostname_resolution)
works. Then enable systemd services pacserve, pacdbserve and pacredir,
open TCP ports 7078 and 7079 and add the following line to your
repository definitions in `pacman.conf`:

> Include = /etc/pacman.d/pacserve

Do not worry if `pacman` reports:

> error: failed retrieving file 'core.db' from localhost:7077 : The
> requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found

This is ok, it just tells `pacman` that `pacserve` could not find a file
and downloading it from an official server is required.