This is a small guide on How to add official Kali Linux Repositories.

Kali Linux source.list Repositories page: Official Link

We’ve seen many people break their Kali Linux installations by following unofficial advice, or arbitrarily populating their sources.list file with unneeded repositories. The following post aims to clarify what repositories should exist in sources.list, and when they should be used.

Any additional repositories added to the Kali sources.list file will most likely BREAK YOUR KALI LINUX INSTALL.

Kali Linux 2.0 – Kali Sana users, use this guide instead. How to add official Kali Linux Repositories? – Kali Linux 2.x Sana repositories

Open sources.list and comment all lines with # in front

The simplest way is to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list

 leafpad /etc/apt/sources.list

If you’re serious about keeping Kali Linux stable, then remove or comment every-line with # at the front and add the following lines..

Add Official Repo’s only:

If you’ve added Bleeding edge repo, 3rd party repo etc. you should have the technical skills to fix your Kali installation at a later stage. As far I’ve seen, Kali dev team doesn’t really care or support 3rd party repo and when you break stuffs, you will possibly met with a silence or a flat “reinstall” answer. Choice is yours.

WARNING: Following guide is for Kali Linux 1.x.

Kali Linux 2.0 – Kali Sana users, use this guide instead. How to add official Kali Linux Repositories? – Kali Linux 2.x Sana repositories

Following is the official repository for Kali Linux.

## Regular repositories
deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali main non-free contrib
deb http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free
## Source repositories
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali main non-free contrib
deb-src http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free

Save and close the file.

Clean your apt-get

apt-get clean

STOP:  To fix Kali apt-get slow update follow the guide on fixing Kali apt-get slow update.

To switch repositories to a different mirror of your choice, follow the guide on changing repositories to a different mirror.

Do an apt-get update

apt-get update

Do and upgrade

apt-get upgrade

Finally do a distribution upgrade

apt-get dist-upgrade

That’s it, you’re set.

Conclusion

I have seen users go on and add Bleeding Edge repo or narrow it down to amd64, i386 repo etc. I just don’t see the point of doing that like some are used to doing in Debian or other distributions. Kali repo is quite smart and as long your architecture was not fiddled with, you can always use the repo I’ve listed above to pull updates.

One more thing, unless you know what you are doing, just don’t add Bleeding Edge repo. It’s repo under development and you will end up having more issues for little benefit. But if you are a developer yourself, go ahead.

It is very important to keep Kali updated as Kali dev team will remove old version quite often. If you have a very old Kali ISO, perhaps just download a new ISO and start from there. Either way, thanks for reading. Do share RT.