Can i automatically clean cache of apt archives?

Linux Support
1

I need to make sure that the apt package cache (I mounted it in RAM, so it’s important not to clutter up the RAM) is automatically cleared after a successful installation/update process. Is it possible?

2

If /var/cache/apt/archives is mounted in RAM, you can let APT auto clean it after each successful install or upgrade. Create a small config file:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/apt.conf.d
echo 'APT::Clean-Installed "true";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99clean

From now on, apt will clean out downloaded packages it no longer needs after installs/updates, so your RAM-backed cache will not keep growing.

also since it’s in tmpfs, anything left there also disappears on reboot so you don’t need extra cron jobs or scripts.

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3

Many tanks! It worked!

Issue was in cache size. It was cluttering RAM and I had to reboot it to clean up. This fixed issue

As I understand, this will clean ONLY cache, right?

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4

If you have limited RAM, you should be runing ZRAM:

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5

While this is certainly a solid and automatic solution, I have a manual solution that truly is not MUCH more difficult, except for the fact that a person has to take care of it. For a guy like me, I’d rather have complete control, so as I acknowledge, this is one good method, an alternative is to create a few really convenient alias commands in your .bashrc (assuming you’re using Bash), otherwise equivalent alias commands in whatever you do use.

Example:

alias aa=‘sudo apt autoremove’
alias ac=‘sudo apt clean’

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6

Love this. I love time savers also. But like @Brian_Masinick I prefer the control/timing.

My alias of choice is: upd for:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade && sudo apt autoremove && sudo apt autoclean

By default, apt stores to disk not ram. But you can clean ram manually also using:

sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This immediately frees up RAM (note: this will increase disk I/O and slow down applications that need to reload data into cache afterward).

It’s an option, but with 16 GB of RAM, you really should not have too much space issues.

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