apt-get fails: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/https could not be found

Sounds like you may have added some https sources. Since there are no https sources in your sources.list, it would be something in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.

You may also be dealing with a proxy that always redirects to https.

You can add support for https apt sources by installing a couple of packages:

apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates

If your apt-get is too broken to do this, you can download the package directly and install it with dpkg -i. Any additional dependencies of that package can be tracked down and fetched similarly (dpkg will let you know if anything is missing).

If it still doesn't work, you might try editing the source entry to use http instead of https, or just remove it and start over following the source maintainer's instructions.

For me this issue happened because one of the mirrors happened to always redirect to https. So none of my sources were https, but due to the redirect, apt would end up trying to fetch something off an https site. To resolve this, I had to manually download and install:

• libcurl3-gnutls and
• apt-transport-https

(apt-transport-https had a dependency on libcurl3-gnutls).

Once those were installed, I was able to successfully install any other package, even if the mirror was on https.

There are a few possible incidents which lead to this type of issues. The most likely solution would be to run:

apt-get update
apt-get install apt-transport-https

You can find more details and possible causes for this issue here.