Exercise 10-2: Creating a Kali Repository

Now that you have a custom package, you can distribute it through an APT package repository. Use reprepro to create the desired repository and to fill it.

A package repository is typically hosted on a server. To properly separate it from other services running on the server, it is best to create a user dedicated to this service. In the dedicated user account, you will be able to host the repository files and also the GnuPG key that will be used to sign the package repository:

Note that we don’t enter a passphrase so that we can sign in non-interactively.

Next, set up the repository structure. A dedicated directory is necessary for reprepro and inside that directory you have to create a conf/distributions file documenting which distributions are available in the package repository:

Next, edit conf/distributions..

.. to look like this:

With this basic setup in place, you can let reprepro generate an empty repository:

Ask reprepro to include the package. Use the .changes file from your previous custom package!

Notice that reprepro added the files into its own package pool in a pool sub-directory:

The dists and pool directories are the two directories that you need to make (publicly) available over HTTP to finish the setup of your APT repository. They contain all the files that APT will want to download.

Assuming that you want to host this on a virtual host named pkgrepo.offsec.com, you could create the following 2 configuration file, save it to /etc/apache2/sites-available/pkgrepo.offsec.com.conf, and enable it with a2ensite pkgrepo.offsec.com):

And the corresponding sources.list entry to add on machines that need packages from this repository would look like this:

Your package is now published and should be available to your networked hosts.