Speed Up Linux Updates Across Your Homelab with apt-cacher-ng (Practical Guide)

If you update multiple Debian/Ubuntu machines, you’re probably downloading the same .deb files repeatedly. That wastes bandwidth, slows patching windows, and makes offline-ish maintenance harder than it needs to be. A better pattern is a local APT cache server with apt-cacher-ng : first machine downloads packages from upstream the cache keeps those package files locally next machines reuse cached packages over LAN This post gives you a complete setup you can actually run. Why this works (and where it doesn’t) apt-cacher-ng acts like a proxy/cache for APT repositories. Package payloads over HTTP can be cached and reused. For HTTPS repos, a common approach is CONNECT pass-through. That keeps transport encrypted but generally does not cache HTTPS payloads in that mode. So in real deployments, gains depend on your repo mix and transport path. 1) Install apt-cacher-ng on one Linux host Choose a host reachable by your clients (for example 192.168.1.50 ). sudo apt update sudo apt install -y a