Pacoloco is a web server that acts if it was an Arch Linux pacman repository. Every time pacoloco server gets a request from user it downloads this file from real Arch Linux mirror and bypasses it to the user. Additionally pacoloco saves this file to local filesystem cache and serves it to the future users.

Fast internet is still a luxury in many parts of the world. There are many places where access to internet is expensive and slow due to geographical and economical reasons.

Now think about a situation when multiple pacman users connected via fast local network. Each of these users needs to download the same set of files. Pacoloco allows to minimize the Internet workload by caching pacman files content and serving it over fast local network.

Pacoloco does not mirror the whole Arch repository. It only downloads files needed by local users. You can think of pacoloco as a lazy Arch mirror.

Install pacoloco-git package from AUR repository. Then start its systemd service: # systemctl start pacoloco.

Optionally you can build the binary from sources using go build command.

The server configuration is located at /etc/pacoloco.yaml. Here is an example how the config file looks like:

port: 9129
cache_dir: /var/cache/pacoloco
purge_files_after: 360000 # 360000 seconds or 100 hours
download_timeout: 200 # 200 seconds
repos:
  archlinux:
    urls:
      - http://mirror.lty.me/archlinux
      - http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux
  quarry:
    url: http://pkgbuild.com/~anatolik/quarry/x86_64
  sublime:
    url: https://download.sublimetext.com/arch/stable/x86_64

• cache_dir is the cache directory, this location needs to read/writable by the server process.
• purge_files_after specifies inactivity duration (in seconds) after which the file should be removed from the cache. This functionality uses unix "AccessTime" field to find out inactive files. Default value is 0 that means never run the purging.
• port is the server port.
• download_timeout is a timeout (in seconds) for internet->cache downloads. If a remote server gets slow and file download takes longer than this will be terminated. Default value is 0 that means no timeout.
• repos is a list of repositories to mirror. Each repo needs name and url of its Arch mirrors. Note that url can be specified either with url or urls properties, one and only one can be used for each repo configuration.

With the example configured above http://YOURSERVER:9129/repo/archlinux looks exactly like an Arch pacman mirror. For example a request to http://YOURSERVER:9129/repo/archlinux/core/os/x86_64/openssh-8.2p1-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst will be served with file content from http://mirror.lty.me/archlinux/core/os/x86_64/openssh-8.2p1-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Once the pacoloco server is up and running it is time to configure the user host. Modify user's /etc/pacman.conf with

[core]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[extra]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[community]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[quarry]
Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/quarry

[sublime-text]
Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/sublime

And /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist with

Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

That's it. Since now pacman requests will be proxied through our pacoloco server.

pacoloco does not care about the architecture of your repo as it acts as a mere proxy.

Thus it can handle multiple different arches transparently. One way to do it is to add multiple repositories with names foobar_$arch e.g.:

repos:
  archlinux_x86_64:
    urls:
      - http://mirror.lty.me/archlinux
      - http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux
  archlinux_armv7h:
    url: http://mirror.archlinuxarm.org
  archlinux_x86:
    url: http://mirror.clarkson.edu/archlinux32

Then modify user's /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and add

For x86_64:

Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/archlinux_$arch/$repo/os/$arch

For armv7h:

Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/archlinux_$arch/$arch/$repo

For x86:

Server = http://yourpacoloco:9129/repo/archlinux_$arch/$arch/$repo

Please note that archlinux_$arch is the repo name in pacoloco.yaml.