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Some software projects and some Debian developers provide extra repositories that you can use besides the official ones. There are a variety of potential reasons for the existence of these repositories and the unavailability of their contents in the official repositories:

• The software may not yet be included in Debian (e.g., Dotdeb)
• There may be legal concerns with the software (e.g., Deb Multimedia)
• The software may be closed source (e.g., Oracle, Opera)
• Upstream may wish to make available newer versions of the software than the ones in Debian (e.g., Tor Project, Xpra)

Extrepo

For a long time, adding repositories to a Debian installation has been a manual process which could be dangerously insecure. From Debian 11 (or 10 with backports), a vastly superior solution is available in the form of the Debian package extrepo (homepage).

The External repositories team explains:

• Currently, most external repositories are configured by asking the user to download an unsigned shell script and to run that as root. While most such scripts are fairly simple and downloaded over https, they do require that the user trust that the script has not been replaced by something malicious, with no way for her to verify that. While the ideal situation would be that the software is made available in Debian proper, this is not always possible. This package tries to remedy the situation, by:
  • Providing a (curated and signed) index of available external repositories;
  • Providing a package, shipped with Debian, that downloads and validates that index, allowing users to enable external repositories by simply running a single command.
  This should allow such users to enable external repositories without having to run an unsigned script as root.

The extrepo-data repository (available as Debian package extrepo-offline-data) contains a list of Debian repositories that includes most or all of the ones listed below, plus many more (thus largely obsoleting this page).

Some unofficial Debian repositories

We use the following tags to describe the repositories, to give an idea of the trust one may wish to place in these repositories:

• DD : The repository is managed by a Debian developer or a Debian maintainer
• FLOSS: the repository contains only free/opensource software
• COM: the repository is backed by an external commercial identity.

These tags can be combined

Here is a list of known places :

• Deb Multimedia

  • DD
  • Provides mostly multimedia packages for stable/testing/unstable, including non-free software. Note that the repository includes packages which override the official Debian versions of packages of the same names.

• Debian Ports

  • DD, FLOSS, semi official

  • Provides several unofficial ports. There are some mirrors.

• Debian WRT for Embedded Devices

  • FLOSS
  • OpenWRT fused with Debian

  • Follow on Twitter https://twitter.com/DebWrt

• Dotdeb

  • FLOSS
  • Provides backports to Debian Stable of up to dates versions of the MySql/Php LAMP stack

  • Dotdeb has announced that "Dotdeb has come to an end."

• MongoDB

  • COM, FLOSS
  • Provides the MongoDB database.

  • deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/debian-sysvinit dist 10gen

• NeuroDebian

  • DD
  • Staging area and backports (Debian/Ubuntu) for neuroscience software

• OpenNMS

  • FLOSS, COM
  • Provides opennms, a Network Management Solution

• Opera

  • COM
  • Provides the non-free Opera web browser

• http://oss.oracle.com/debian

  • COM
  • Provides the Oracle Express Database (free of cost, but not DFSG free software).

  • deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

• VirtualBox

  • COM

  • Provides non-free edition of VirtualBox. (A free software edition is in the contrib section of the Debian archive.)

• PostgreSQL

  • FLOSS
  • Provides all versions of PostgreSQL

• QGIS

  • FLOSS
  • Provides the latest package versions of QGIS

• Tor Project

  • FLOSS

  • Upstream says: "The Tor Project maintains its own Debian package repository. Since Debian provides the LTS version of Tor, this might not always give you the latest stable Tor version. Therefore, it's recommended to install tor from our repository."

• VSCodium

  • FLOSS
  • Open source binaries of Microsoft's VS (Visual Studio) Code

• Xpra

  • FLOSS

  • Available in the official repos, but upstream strongly recommends the avoidance of distro packages and the use instead of their own

• Atom

  • FLOSS
  • The Atom text editor - "a hackable text editor for the 21st Century"

• Google Linux Software Repositories

  • COM

  • Google lists their repositories here. Details of some of them follow:

    • Non-free Google Chrome browser. (The official Debian archive contains packages for Chromium, the free software version of the same codebase.)

      • deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

    • Non-free Google Earth

      • deb http://dl.google.com/linux/earth/deb/ stable main

    • Non-free Google Talk plugin

      • deb http://dl.google.com/linux/talkplugin/deb/ stable main

    • Non-free mod_pagespeed module for Apache

      • deb http://dl.google.com/linux/mod-pagespeed/deb/ stable main

• Linux Software Repository for Microsoft Products

  • COM

  • Instructions in its Debian section.

  • All available distribution versions are here.

    • Microsoft Visual Studio Code. (See also its free software version VSCodium quoted above.)

      • deb https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main

• ICINGA Package Repository

  • COM
  • Description: Monitor Your Entire Infrastructure

• Some more are listed in the Teams/Apt/Sha1Removal page.

Possible troubles

In some cases, in order to install an unofficial package, you may need to create dummy package to resolve a very simple dependency lock when, for example, a package has just been renamed by the Debian release changes.