Kali sources.list Repositories

The single most common causes of a broken Kali Linux installation are following unofficial advice, and particularly arbitrarily populating the system’s sources.list file with unofficial 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.

The Kali Rolling Repository

kali-rolling is our current active repository since the release of Kali 2016.1. Kali Rolling users are expected to have the following entries in their sources.list:

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free

Retired Kali sana (2.0) Repositories

For access to the retired sana repositories, have the following entries in your sources.list:

deb http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib

Retired Kali moto (1.0) Repositories

For access to the retired moto repositories, have the following entries in your sources.list:

deb http://old.kali.org/kali moto main non-free contrib
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali moto main non-free contrib

You can find a list of official Kali Linux mirrors here.

More about Kali Repositories

The kali-dev Repository

WARNING: While kali-dev is publicly accessible to everybody on all Kali mirrors, this distribution should not be used by end-users as it will regularly break.

This repository is actually Debian’s Testing distribution with all the kali-specific packages (available in the kali-dev-only repository) force-injected with Kali packages taking precedence over the Debian packages. Sometimes when Testing changes, some Kali packages must be updated and this will not happen immediately. During this time, kali-dev is likely to be broken. This repository is where Kali developers push updated packages and is the basis used to create kali-rolling.

In contrast to kali-dev, kali-rolling is expected to be of better quality because it’s managed by a tool that ensures installability of all the packages it contains. The tool picks updated packages from kali-dev and copies them to kali-rolling only when they have been verified to be installable. The repository is also fed by a stream of tool updates, of which we get notified via our upstream git tagging watch list.