It was hectic, took a while for the system to figure out and sort all the versions held there but

eventually it progressed and borked and could not continue due to too many errors (dependency not found).

So, that was just upgrading a clean install to current, from my offline cache, copied from /var/cache/apt/.

I had to do a clean install to get the system back up and running.

Another thing I have tried is the "mount iso" for use as a repo... never worked, not secure enough.

So when I see things that may help using a local repo, I'd like to try it.

The package I mentioned before, local-apt-repository is not available for Devuan, probably because of system D, but I'd still like to try it (apt works!).

I agree with @aluma, I too just use the absolute path to the package...

but I have several bash scripts that install groups of packages... for different stages of installation and restore of backup config files.

All of this is with off-line installation in mind (as a motive).

anyhow, the quest goes on. Thank you Devuan Devs for giving this stable platform to work from.

Thanks for the information, this is new to me.
Although the page in your link has a dependency on systemd.

But to be honest, I don’t have such global tasks as the respected topic starter @oui.
If I need to install a couple of downloaded packages, then simply apt install "path_file_name" is usually enough.

Regards.

from here...https://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/local-apt-repository

It mentions only served local, no gpg.

I haven't tried this yet.

apt-cdrom

And the difficult path is described here, but only in Russian, I didn’t find another one.
https://wiki.debian.org/ru/CreateLocalR … DVD_Debian

example in an other distro:

in Slitaz, for ex. can you use all the contents of /var/www are automatically stored so they can be acceded by the url http://localhost/... ;-)

more simple is not possible!