Mirrors

The distribution of Ubuntu CD images and packages can always be improved. The ubuntu-mirror-admins team works to improve user experiences every day, making Ubuntu available. You can help too, by creating a mirror of your own and providing people near you with a reliable mirror.

Mirrors series

Mirrors overview:

About mirrors (this page)

Reference:

Mirror types

There are two types of mirrors:

  • Country mirrors (e.g. nl.archive.ubuntu.com/nl.releases.ubuntu.com)

  • Normal mirrors (reachable via their own hostname)

If you want to create a new mirror, please read this page and its sub-pages. To apply for being a country mirror, read these requirements.

Registration

If your mirror is meant to be used by others, register it at Launchpad. When your registration is successful and approved, it will show up on the mirror lists on Launchpad. It will also be checked by Launchpad.

If you registered a CD mirror, and registration is successful and approved, your mirror will be selected for nearby users when they click on the the download button on the Ubuntu download pages.

Mirror guidelines

To keep your mirror up to date and working, follow these guidelines:

Be committed to being a mirror

Obviously, each offer to be an Ubuntu mirror is great and users appreciate it. However, it’s in nobody’s interest to go and change the sources.list every time a mirror disappears. So if you’re not planning on creating a mirror for the long run, don’t register it. People might get disappointed in you and/or Ubuntu.

Know what you’re starting with

A mirror may cause a lot of traffic. If your server has insufficient bandwidth, users cannot download very well and your machine may become unreachable. If you pay for traffic, please note that traffic might increase (a lot).

Make sure you have enough disk space

The Ubuntu archive, as of September 2025, uses about:

  • 2.6TB of disk space for the Ubuntu Package Archive

  • 50GB for Ubuntu release CD images

… and it only grows larger. A full disk will put you out of sync and cause problems for your users.

Keep up to date

Try to mirror about four times a day (every six hours) for Archive mirrors. Since Ubuntu only releases every six months or so, a daily check on a Releases mirror is sufficient.

Push mirroring is available as an alternative.

Monitor the output of your sync scripts

Sometimes, mirror syncing fails. That’s OK, but it is important that you monitor and correct faults. Missing packages are not very user-friendly, so try to avoid that.

Subscribe to the mirror mailing lists

There are two mailing lists for mirror admins. You have the ubuntu-mirrors mailing list for discussion, tips and tricks about mirroring. There’s also ubuntu-mirrors-announce which announces big updates and deletes on the mirrors.

Country mirror requirements

If you want to apply for being a country mirror, you MUST follow these requirements:

Syncs

For an Archive mirror:

For a Releases mirror:

  • Update every 4 hours (six times per day)

  • or have push mirroring set up.

Provide the following services:

  • HTTP

  • Optional (but beneficial) rsync (modules ‘ubuntu’ for Archive and ‘releases’ for Releases).

Keep your Launchpad account up to date

So we can reach you if needed.

  • For an Archive mirror, the Archive must be available at: http://<country-code>.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

  • For a Releases mirror, the Releases must be available at: http://<country-code>.releases.ubuntu.com/

Subscribe

to ubuntu-mirrors-announce which announces big updates and deletes on the mirrors.

Note

The way APT works means that all of the hosts behind a given name must be in sync.

If there is already a country mirror for that country, then you need to work out with that country mirror which one is the better one going forward, since there can only be one.

If there is more than one host, they should be on the same LAN and making sure that they remain consistent in the view that they present to the users.

Existing mirrors

You can find the list of currently registered mirrors on Launchpad:

To identify which country mirror you are connecting to, you can do a CNAME lookup on the URL and cross reference the result with the relevant list above. You can use the dig command on the terminal to do this, e.g. dig nl.archive.ubuntu.com.

Communication

If you want to get in touch with other mirror admins, or you have questions or issues with a mirror, email us at mirrors@ubuntu.com to open a ticket.