Cannot add PPA ERROR user or team does not exist

Question

Running on a freshly booted instance of ubuntu 16.04 LTS cloud image, I'm trying to add juju ppa with the following command:

ubuntu@gateway:~$ sudo add-apt-repository --update ppa:juju/stable
Cannot add PPA: 'ppa:~juju/ubuntu/stable'.
ERROR: '~juju' user or team does not exist.

Few contextual information:

• I'm connected through ssh on this gateway machine
• this instance is running in our openstack private cloud
• it has access to the web (ie "apt update" runs fine)
• there is a proxy for http/https which is set in /etc/environment
• we installed our on SSL certificate issuer for https proxy

I'm pretty sure it's related to the last point and/or the proxy that is not correctly used by add-apt-repository... Any help would be welcome.

Solution

The cert should be added by add-apt automatically. if you are sure that there is no typo in the PPA name, maybe try without the --update. I am using the syntax without --update and it worked fine. You could also check the normal url in a browser:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/juju/stable/ubuntu

It should list the structure with the files. If not check that address. Using /etc/apt/sources.list you could also add the path manually, but then need to download the certificate and install it in /etc/apt/trusted.d folder.

CatMan

Comments

[gdupont]

Technically not the answer but I think your pointed in the right direction. The --update did not change anything and the url is accessible from my machine. But the certificate is invalid since my proxy rewrite them on the fly (so it can audit all traffic). So I need to declare our local certificate issuer in apt trusted and it should be ok. I'll test that (didn't know it was independent from cert in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ ) and I'll update soon.

[CatMan]

@gdupont If that indeed was the issue, I guess it would be interesting for others to learn about that implication of using a certain proxy. Would be nice if you would create an answer yourself describing the causing issue and the solution and accept it yourself to mark the questions as close. Glad I could hint.

[bogdan]

I suggest installing juju as snap. Installing it from PPA is to have specific version to run tests is fine but preferred way is to have it as snap.

[gdupont]

Thanks for the feedback, unfortunately, not the issue (NTP hierarchy was fine and top level was a GPS box...). But I checked that since it might have been the issue.

[gdupont]

Not so soon feedback: I managed to fix by adding the local certificate in apt trusted. @bogdan: not sure the snap package was ready at time I asked the question (or I was not really familiar with snap yet...)