How do I install wpa-supplicant on an offline server?

Alright, I have an Ubuntu server on which I couldn't connect to my WPA2 secured Wi-Fi network.

Apparently I need wpa-supplicant to be able to connect to it (see How do I connect to a WPA wifi network using the command line?), but ironically I can't download it being offline. So, how can I download wpa-supplicant, get it on a USB device and install it on the server? I have no idea so far...

PS: I only have a Mac as a primary machine, so I can't download it from another Ubuntu.


You can doownload most/all packages from the main Ubuntu repositories from http://packages.ubuntu.com. You can search for it from this page, find it from here, and download it from one of these pages:

  • 32bit: http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/i386/wpasupplicant/download
  • 64bit: http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/amd64/wpasupplicant/download

The problem here is that some packages it needs may to be downloaded as well - you can test that by trying to install it, and seeing if it exits with any errors.

Another way of doing it would be to run apt-get install --print-uris wpasupplicant[1] on the server, and downloading it with the machine that has internet access, and transferring the deb file(s). This will likely be better as it will list other packages it needs as dependencies.

For example, it might give on a Ubuntu 14.04 64bit machine http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/w/wpa/wpasupplicant_2.1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb.

Once you have managed to get the needed deb files, you can install it with dpkg -i /PATH/TO/FILE(S).deb.

1: this will likely only work if the machine has had access to the internet to update the package lists - the print-uris just tells it to print what was going to download instead of downloading it