How to download a package and its dependencies with aptitude?

Question

I am trying to download some debian packages and their dependencies in a directory.

I tried using the command aptitude download <package_name> it downloaded the package without its dependencies.

How do I tell it to download the dependencies too?

This seems to be a duplicate of this. Will the accepted answer work in your case? — , Sep 29 '16 at 06:35

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 29 '16 at 07:12

14

You can use apt-rdepends to build the complete set of dependencies (recursively), including the main package, then download that:

apt-get download $(apt-rdepends "${package}" | grep -v ^\ )

(replacing "${package}" of course).

answered Sep 29 '16 at 07:12

Stephen Kitt

that's great, and it places a bunch of .debs into the current directory. But it can give errors like E: Can't select candidate version from package c-compiler as it has no candidate when there are virtual packages in the list. – Andrey Regentov Jul 05 '20 at 15:57
That’s a good point, thanks for raising it; apt-repends also suffers from listing alternatives equally (for example, cargo is listed as depending on gcc, clang and c-compiler). – Stephen Kitt Jul 05 '20 at 16:57

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 29 '16 at 06:32

A rather hackish way to do that is to have another utility (apt-cache in this example) list the package's dependencies:

# PACKAGE=nautilus; aptitude download $PACKAGE $(apt-cache depends "$PACKAGE" | grep Depends | awk -F ': ' '{print $NF}' | xargs)

score 1 · Answer 3 · 2016-09-29T16:36:44.737

1

Easier Way

aptitude -d -o Dir::Cache:archives=/home/alex/aptitude-test/ install alsaplayer for exampel.

edited Sep 29 '16 at 16:36

answered Sep 29 '16 at 16:26

3 Answers3