Hi guys, today I am going to explain to you what is PPA, what is it used for, and how you can use it. In this tutorial, I am going to use Ubuntu 20.04. Without further due, let's hop into the topic.
1. What is PPA?
PPA stands for Personal Package Archive. The PPA allows application developers and Linux users to create their repositories to distribute software. With PPA, you can easily get newer software versions or software that are not available via the official Ubuntu repositories.
Before you understand PPA, you should know the concept of repositories in Linux. You can read about them here
2. Why is PPA used?
Imagine you are a developer and you release a cool Linux application, and you want to distribute it among other Linux users. Here comes the PPA, you can create a repository and put your application there, after that you can tell the other Linux user what is your repository and they will be able to use your app thanks to the PPA feature of Linux.
There is a second case, imagine you work on a very important project, and some of the tools you are using are being updated. For the main repo of the Linux distro to adopt them and put it in use, it will take some time, but if you have the repository of the developer that has to update the tools added through PPA, you will be able to use the updated tools immediately.
3. How to use PPA?
PPA is used when you want to add a new repository to the repository list in the Linux distro, or to remove one that is no longer needed.
To add a repo you use add-apt-repository and then the repo's name.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
To use the added repo with you have to update first its repo list.
To do this just update the apt.
sudo apt update
Then you can use the added repo to install the software it contains in our example we have added the python repo.
So we are going to install a python version.
sudo apt install python3.10
Congratulations now you know how to use PPA, what it is, and why it is important.
If you have any questions, leave a comment, I will answer as soon as possible.
Top comments (1)
Noone considers Linux to be synonymous with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is just one of the countless Linux distros. Please fix your terminology. It's unfair to people trying to learn more about Linux to deal with incorrect usage of popular terminoligy.