security.debian.org 'does not have a Release file' on with Debian Docker images

It appears as both debian:stable-slim and debian:stable are both currently broken (for updates):

> $ docker run -ti --rm  debian:stable-slim
Unable to find image 'debian:stable-slim' locally
stable-slim: Pulling from library/debian
fc491617b0f1: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:a85c2c0e634946e92a6f4a9a4f6ce5f19ce7c11885bc198f04ab3ae8dacbaffa
Status: Downloaded newer image for debian:stable-slim
root@e610973ac2f8:/# apt update
Ign:1 http://security.debian.org/debian-security stable/updates InRelease
Err:2 http://security.debian.org/debian-security stable/updates Release
  404  Not Found [IP: 151.101.130.132 80]
Get:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian stable InRelease [113 kB]
Get:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian stable-updates InRelease [36.8 kB]
Get:5 http://deb.debian.org/debian stable/main amd64 Packages [8178 kB]
Reading package lists... Done
E: The repository 'http://security.debian.org/debian-security stable/updates Release' does not have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

Anyone else experienced this or found a workaround?

Issue

Faced this issue on a Debian Stretch (9) Docker image.

The below error came up when running apt-get update

W: The repository 'http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates Release' does not have a Release file.
W: The repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch Release' does not have a Release file.
W: The repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates Release' does not have a Release file.
E: Failed to fetch http://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/stretch/updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found [IP: xx]
E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found
E: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch-updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Background

This is related to the security repo in particular.

These repo definitions are used by apt to fetch update and they are defined in /etc/apt/sources.list

The official Debian Security recommendation - https://www.debian.org/security/

To keep your Debian operating system up-to-date with security patches, please add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

`deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free`

Answer

Add this line in the Dockerfile

RUN echo "deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list

RUN apt-get update

Other solutions

What didn't work for me:

• Changing the repo to stable-security
• Running apt with --allow-releaseinfo-change flag - the flag pairing with apt-get update was not recognised

What else worked:

• Instead of using the bullseye security repo you could use the stretch archive repo deb http://archive.debian.org/debian stretch main contrib non-free; it would be better to stick to the security from the latest release from a security perspective

Update

The above is correct if you are just zooming in on the security repo issue.

Why are we having these problems with the security repo?

In my case Debian 9 is an archived, unsupported, unmaintained version.

Although I could "fix" (bypass) the security repo, I had further issues with dependency repos for APT. Since the version is deprecated these repos needed to point to archive.

In general this forced me to upgrade to Debian 10. On Debian 10 I had no need for the above fix.

I was able to fix this by changing this line:

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stable/updates main

to

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stable-security/updates main

You can do that by running:

sed -i 's/stable\/updates/stable-security\/updates/' /etc/apt/sources.list