Kali Linux Apt Repositories Missing

I went to update a Kali Linux virtual machine recently and found it wasn’t pulling back anything when running the apt-get update command. This was a new deployment of Kali so I figured the sources.list file must be missing the necessary repositories. It’s important to note that my examples are executed while running as root, if running as a standard user you will need to leverage sudo. Of course running as root has it’s risks but this being a new install I hadn’t got round to creating my users.

The official Kali Linux documentation relating to this post can be found here – Kali sources.list Repositories

 

The sources.list file can be found in /etc/apt/

ls /etc/apt/

 

If running in a GUI we can use the gedit program to make the necessary changes to sources.list

root@KALI:~# gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

I’ve added the necessary repositories to the end of the file –

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free

gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

 

The file can also be edit from the command line via something like VI

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

 

Finally we could use some form of redirection from the command line, in this example using cat to redirect my input to the sources.list file. Note the use of >> to append the input to the end of the file, using a single > would overwrite the contents of the file.

root@KALI:~# cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
root@KALI:~#

cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list

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