What's new on Cloudsmith

Cloudsmith is your friendly neighbourhood Package Management SaaS; for secure delivery of the world's software. For DevOps-y people.

New
September 10, 2021

Let's Hash It Out: Debian Acquire-By-Hash

Our more observant Debian users may have noticed that we rolled out support for acquire-by-hash over the past week - you may have also noticed fewer pipeline disruptions as a result!

Image #1

What does this mean for me?

If you're someone spinning many plates, you may have encountered some hiccups with your pipeline when updating your repository whilst simultaneously deploying from it - causing `hash sum mismatch` errors. This is the result of an active repository, with indexes fetched while the repository is in a state of change.

Well, no more - farewell to the troubles of yesterday! Debian acquire-by-hash functionality is here to steady the ship and avoid pipeline interruptions caused by those pesky race conditions. This removes the need for any pipeline workarounds - e.g. built-in delays.

How does one acquire this functionality?

So long as you are using APT v1.2.0 or newer, APT will take care of the rest. If you're not, we recommend upgrading - but don't worry, your client will still work; it just won't be able to fetch indexes using acquire-by-hash.

We have more exciting news on the way...

Keep an eye on our changelog; we have some exciting updates landing very soon - we think you'll be just as excited as us when they land!