I was trying to upgrade NGINX on an Ubuntu 12.04 box today. Preferring to use APT and be a little bit behind the bleeding edge, rather than having to deal with the hassle of compiling from source, I wanted to add the nginx/development PPA. (NGINX’s development branch is reliable enough for production usage, the development branch merely being subject to more frequent changes.)

When I went to add the PPA with add-apt-repository, I was met with a “command not found” error. This is a well-documented issue, where the command isn’t installed by default, and has to be added by downloading the python-software-properties package. To my surprise, it didn’t work. I spent about a quarter hour searching for a reason why, but pretty much every page said “just install python-software-properties.” Yeah, I already tried that.

I ended up using apt-file search to discover where add-apt-repository is supposed to reside.

Apparently, it was moved somewhere along the line. Instead of being in python-software-properties, add-apt-repository is now a part of software-properties-common. So if you want to install add-apt-repository for your PPA needs, you just need to apt-get install software-properties-common.