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I have a local mirror (created with debmirror), and when I run apt-get update after a few days, I get this:

E: Release file expired, ignoring file:/home/wena/.repo_bin/dists/sid/Release (invalid since 14h 31min 45s)

How do I work around that?

tshepang
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    Security Warning: This question asks for a work around. However it is better to fix the mirror or point to a working one. I changed to point at http://httpredir.debian.org/debian and it started working again. – ctrl-alt-delor Jun 02 '17 at 07:37
  • Switch to a different mirror and it'll work. – Patrick Mutwiri Jul 21 '18 at 12:49
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    What is "better" depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to get the latest packages from Debian then changing mirror is the right soloution. If your goal is to use the older mirror that you have locally so you can get on with your work where Internet is unavailable or expensive then turning off the expiry check is the right solution. If your goal is to update to a specific older version of the repo for bug triage reasons then again turning off the expiry check is the right solution. – plugwash Sep 20 '18 at 19:11
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    Indeed, I reached this message while using Debian Archive for a Debian Wheezy system that can't be updated. – JucaPirama May 23 '19 at 16:21

10 Answers10

157

Add this to the command:

-o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false

For example:

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update
tshepang
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A A
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    This worked, but some explanation of why it did would be useful. – Faheem Mitha Sep 09 '14 at 23:17
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    This deactivates the check which verifies expired digital signatures, so apt will accept old and expired release keys as well. – grin May 31 '17 at 11:05
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    Security Warning: This answer is a work around (as asked for). However it is better to fix the mirror or point to a working one. I changed to point at http://httpredir.debian.org/debian and it started working again. – ctrl-alt-delor Jun 02 '17 at 07:36
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    you cannot switch that easily for already deprecated releases like say debian 6 where you need to use archives.debian.org to get any packages now – Marcin Orlowski Aug 23 '18 at 13:46
  • Does not work with Raspbian 10. – Yanick Rochon Nov 07 '19 at 16:53
56

If you do not care about this check, no matter for which mirror, just create a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ (e.g. name it 10no--check-valid-until) and put the option directly in there:

Acquire::Check-Valid-Until "0";

After this, you will never be bothered again with the mentioned warning at all.

Jaleks
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    Although the workaround itself isn't the optimal solution, I have a development box that I don't care about, so this annoyance simply gets in my way. I was able to use this answer with Ansible since I can't find any way to add the accepted answer to the action module when using ansible_pkg_mgr. – jia103 Nov 11 '16 at 23:44
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    one command: echo "Acquire::Check-Valid-Until false;" | tee -a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10-nocheckvalid – rubo77 May 09 '19 at 18:17
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    This is so good for legacy Dockerfiles. Stick this as the first line in a Dockerfile and all your problems go away. Thanks – Andrzej Rehmann Jun 01 '20 at 22:23
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The release files have a valid-until entry, e.g. Valid-Until: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:17:56 UTC

If the release file isn't valid anymore, you should run debmirror again to check if there are any changes in the repository. One change will be the release file and you will get a new validity for it.

You could easily automate this with a crontab entry.

echox
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  • Thanks for that one. I should have looked inside that file before asking. Curiously though, is this a new thing? It didn't happen before (but once). – tshepang Sep 30 '10 at 11:58
  • I don't use debian really often at the moment, but maybe they just changed the release file cycles to a shorter date... – echox Sep 30 '10 at 12:03
8

This can also happen if your system date/time is wrong. I fixed it by correcting my local time before doing the update.

Michael Mrozek
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MarrekNožka
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  • So helpful. Ran into this on Windows 10 + WSL2... Wasn't clear from the error it was system clock dependent, but correcting local time was exactly what was needed. – kevlarr Apr 15 '21 at 15:13
  • SSL / TLS depends on (in principle) the correct time setting... – MarrekNožka Oct 03 '21 at 12:57
7

Not sure whether its related with Jessie current issue (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00006.html) or not. but for those got a same error even already used

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update

and still occurred a same issue, can try this instead

echo 'Acquire::Check-Valid-Until no;' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99no-check-valid-until

It works for me :)

tshepang
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Alex Chandra
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4

I removed /var/lib/apt/* and rerun apt-get update, and it works!

HalosGhost
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Patrick
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3

Some of the mirrors out there might have stale files. This happened to me recently, and it was in also tied to the caching server I'm using (apt-cacher-ng) which tries to save bandwidth by redirecting the repositories for same archive to a single entity (in my case if was a Hungarian mirror). Direct updates through German mirror worked ok, for example. Try changing the mirror you're using. In case you're using apt-cacher-ng, you'll need to do something in the line of changing the following file's contents:

  • /etc/apt-cacher-ng/backends_debian
  • /etc/apt-cacher-ng/backends_debvol

After that you should also restart apt-cacher-ng for changes to take effect.

tshepang
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  • Note that I was asking for a workaround, not why this was happening (good answer though). In this case I was, knowingly, having a stale repository. – tshepang May 13 '11 at 12:44
2

I had this issue on Windows WSL2 Ubuntu trying to spin up a docker container. I ran the command below on the CLI and it corrected the time mismatch.

sudo hwclock -s
Andrew Kelly
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1

The mirror might not be expired.

Rather something else on your system might be messed up. Try this:

1) Temporarily comment out related lines from from /etc/apt/sources.list, or /etc/apt/source.list.d/*. For example after I commented out the following two lines, my error went away, (with the consequence that these archives were temporarily not used for reloads):

deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates non-free contrib main
deb http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free

2) Open synaptic and reload, or probably sudo apt-get update would also work.

3) Comment these lines back in.

4) Repeat step 2.

Fixed this for me. I'm guessing my apt cache got a bad date in it.

My problem occurred after restoring my / (root) and /var filesystems from btrfs snapshots to help fix a package install problem that occurred. The exact error message that I was getting was:

Release file for http://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/debian/dists/stretch-updates/InRelease is expired (invalid since 5d 4h 50min 18s). Updates for this repository will not be applied. Release file for http://security.debian.org/dists/stretch/updates/InRelease is expired (invalid since 2d 2h 52min 43s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.

Elliptical view
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0

please check BIOS/System time, you should have the same time

OleksDovz
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