How to Point APT at Chainsaw

Beginner 15 minutes Developers / DevOps Engineers Getting Started

Configure APT on Debian/Ubuntu to fetch packages through your Chainsaw proxy via sources.list and auth.conf.

Overview

Point APT at your Chainsaw instance so Debian/Ubuntu package fetches route through the firewall. This page covers sources.list and auth.conf.

Replace chain305.com with your own Chainsaw deployment host and swap CLIENT_ID / CLIENT_SECRET for credentials issued from the Access page in the dashboard. The @default segment is the org slug — confirm yours under Settings → Organization → Slug. Legacy non-org-scoped URLs return HTTP 400 with error CHW-4314.

Prerequisites

  • A running Chainsaw instance (see Tutorial 01)
  • Client credentials (Client ID and Secret)
  • A Debian/Ubuntu host with APT

sources.list

deb https://CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET@chain305.com/chainproxy/repository/@default/apt-main/ stable main

auth.conf

machine chain305.com
login CLIENT_ID
password CLIENT_SECRET
apt auth.conf(5) supports path-scoped machine tokens (e.g. machine chain305.com/chainproxy/repository/apt-main) if you want to restrict these credentials to Chainsaw repositories only and share the same auth.conf with other APT mirrors on the same host. A bare host is fine when Chainsaw is the only thing listening there.

Verify

Run apt update, then confirm with chainsaw doctor verify-hook and the Traffic page in the dashboard.

Next Steps