Ebuild Protip: Only fetch from SRC_URI

Normally, when emerge or ebuild go to download files, they will try to download from the Gentoo mirrors first.

Sometimes, you want to avoid this. There’s two scenarios:

• You’re developing the ebuild, so the files won’t be on the mirrors (yet), so you want to save yourself the time spent checking the mirrors
• Something necessitates always using the SRC_URI source explicitly.

First scenario

To elect to not use the mirrors on a command by command basis, you can do:

$ GENTOO_MIRRORS="" ebuild foo-1.2.3.ebuild manifest

Typically, you define GENTOO_MIRRORS in /etc/make.conf. We can temporary set it to nothing when we invoke ebuild, which results in the SRC_URI being used first.

Second scenario

To prevent the ebuild from ever being populated to the mirrors, you need to add the following to your ebuild:

RESTRICT="mirror"

Technically, this can go anywhere in the file. However, the common convention seems to be to put it after IUSE.