No worries when elpa is down

I use one liner shell command to clone Emacs Lisp Package Archive (ELPA):

mkdir -p ~/elpaclone && cd ~/elpaclone && curl -L https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents | sed 's/^(1//g' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' | sed 's/\])/])\n/g' | sed 's/^ *(\([a-z0-9A-Z-]*\).*\[(\([0-9 ]*\).*\(single\|tar\).*/\1-\2.\3/g' | sed 's/ /./g' | sed 's/single/el/g' | tr --delete ')' | xargs -i{} curl -L -O https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/{} && curl -L -O https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents

The https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents contains all the information of packages. I re-organize it to make sure each line corresponds to one package. Then I use cURL to download everything.

Usage is simple.

Insert below line at the beginning of ~/.emacs when elpa.gnu.org is down :

(setq package-archives '(("elpaclone" . "~/elpaclone")))

This solution also works for MELPA .