Mirroring support

[XVilka]

Currently it is impossible to make a local or regional mirror for both opam repository and source files in a batch, like some of the Linux distributions or package managers. It would be amazing and useful to setup a couple mirrors on a various regional CDNs, like some other languages/distributions did, And add the instruction on how to add them into the global mirror lists:

• https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/mirrors/
• https://www.debian.org/mirror/list
• https://npmjs.cf/

See example pages on how to setup the mirror:

• https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror
• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Mirrors/Source

See the example of a big mirror from Tencent with various languages, distributions and frameworks: https://mirrors.tencent.com/

I asked this on Discourse but got no easy solution

[rjbou]

The steps are dispersed in the discourse thread. To summarize:

• Set up the mirror
  • copy of opam-repository (git clone)
  • opam admin cache if you want to cache archives
  • opam admin index for http
  • have a webserver
  • for opam.ocaml.org, scripts are in this repo
• Use the mirror
  • opam repo add mirror <url>, to have it as a fallback, or with --rank 1
  • with --set-default to have it as the default one for switch creation

It can be the occasion to have a blog post for that.

[XVilka]

Yes, I would be awesome to have a good step-by-step guide, especially since it will be the IT team who setups this kind of mirror, not seasoned OCaml users/developers.

[dbuenzli]

It can be the occasion to have a blog post for that.

Blog posts are poor substitutes for manuals -- for one thing they are difficult to update. It's better to have that in the manual.