Consuming Public and Private PPAs

PPAs expose packages to clients. To see the packages available in a PPA, navigate to https://launchpad.net/~<team or username>/+archive/ubuntu/<ppa name> and look in “Overview of published packages”.

The process of consuming a PPA depends on whether the PPA is public or private.

Consuming public PPAs

To consume a public PPA, add it to your system with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:<team or username>/<ppa name>
sudo apt update

After adding the PPA and updating the package list, you can install the desired package using apt:

sudo apt install <package_name>

Consuming private PPAs

To consume a private PPA, access must be granted by the PPA owner. To check a private PPA:

  • Go to the Launchpad user page https://launchpad.net/~<username>

  • The link “View your private PPA subscriptions” in the PPA section get you to https://launchpad.net/~username/+archivesubscriptions

  • Click “View” in the PPA you wish to consume. You will see two lines like in the example below:

    deb https://johndoe:[email protected]/my-private-team/myppa/ubuntu plucky main #Personal access of John Doe (johndoe) to My PPA
deb-src https://johndoe:[email protected]/my-private-team/myppa/ubuntu plucky main #Personal access of John Doe (johndoe) to My PPA

    In the example

    • deb refers to binary packages

    • deb-src refers to package sources

    • johndoe is the user name

    • RZ5mq1R0XVlZ5ZJW102 is the password

    • my-private-team is the name of a team

    • myppa is the name of the PPA

    • plucky is an Ubuntu release

    • main is the component of the Ubuntu repository

  • Copy the lines into a file :samp::/etc/apt/sources.list.d/{team-name}-{ppa-name}>.list

  • Adjust the Ubuntu release as needed.

  • Update the sources:

    sudo apt update

  • apt may complain that the public key used to sign the packages in the private PPA is missing from the system with a message similar to:

    The following signatures couldn't be verified because
the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 0123456789012345

    To resolve this, the PPA’s public key needs to be imported:

    gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0123456789012345
gpg --export 0123456789012345 > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/<your-private-ppa>.gpg
sudo apt-get update

  • The packages from the private PPA should now be available via apt:

    sudo apt install <package_name>