Append New Source to sources.list Without Opening the File

Often we need to add new repository on Deb based OS like Debian or Ubuntu from SSH. An example situation can be while installing OpenPanel on Debian or Ubuntu. Here is the guide to show you how to append new source of software to sources.list without opening the File in nano or vi command line editor in simple steps.

Append New Source to sources.list Without Opening the File : First Things First

sources.list file is located at /etc/apt/. Firstly, if you are a new user, take a backup of the file :

However, we would really recommend you create a new .list file and then use the method to avoid direct appending new source to sources.list, store it in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. In other words, in this guide, we will avoid :

Actually this manual method to edit the sources.list file is slower and its difficult to avoid errors.

Append New Source to sources.list Without Opening the File

Like we said in How to Write Shell Script, we can actually echo anything :

Usual format of the list file is :

Basic principal to echo lines is :

In the same way, we can echo sources.list file to add in this way :

However, instead of editing /etc/apt/sources.list, it is simpler to add a new *.list file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d :

In order to add a third-party repository, you first need the public keys for this repository which in this case you can grab from the Ubuntu key server:

After adding any repository it is always needed to execute :

We do not recommend to use /etc/apt/sources.list for third-party repos, use /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ instead.