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Using PPA Repositories ​

The Personal Package Archive (PPA) allows developers to distribute their own software via non-official repositories.

Information about your repositories are stored in the /etc/apt/sources.list file and in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory.

When you issue sudo apt update the repositories configured for your system will pull any versions that are available for update for the software you currently have installed. Then, issuing sudo apt install <package> will pull the newer version of those packages from the repository URL and install the update.

You can add PPA repos to your sources.list.d directory, which enables the standard apt commands for custom (personal) repositiories.

Example

sh
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:custom/repository_name
sudo apt update
sudo apt install repository_name
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:custom/repository_name
sudo apt update
sudo apt install repository_name

The first command adds the repository information to the file /etc/apt/source.list.d/repository_name.list (another backup file is also created with a .save suffix).

Note: Typically you shouldn't mess with the /etc/apt/sources.list file as this is the file that manages your Linux distribution's standard repositories.

Tips ​

  1. Use synaptic to search for files installed with PPA before deleting them

PPA Purge ​

PPA Purge is a command line utility that removes a PPA repository from your software sources list and reverts your system back to official Ubuntu packages. This differs from simply deleting the PPA repo.

Example

sh
sudo apt install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:repository-name
sudo apt install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:repository-name