Sometimes
you'll find you need to be able to collect a bunch of rpm packages you have
together in one place and you want to make them available to your systems
running yum. It is pretty easy to do.
Overview
A
package repository used by yum is simply a directory with one or more RPMs plus
some "meta information" used by yum to be able to easily access
information (dependencies, file lists, etc.) for the RPMs. yum can then to
access this directory over ftp/http or a file URI (including over NFS).
Steps
Collect
the packages together in one directory. You can make as many sub-directories as
you want, but there needs to be a top level directory where they all live.
That's where we're going to form our repository.
Yum
uses a digest of the information stored in each RPM to do its work. This
information is created using the 'createrepo' program. If you don't have
createrepo installed you can install it with:
yum
install createrepo
If you
are generating your repository on a machine that doesn't use RPMs, you can
download createrepo from http://createrepo.baseurl.org/ and build/install it
manually.
Once
you have createrepo installed you need to run it. It only requires one argument
which is the directory in which you would like to generate the repository data.
So if the packages directory we made in step 1 is in /srv/my/repo then you
would run:
createrepo /srv/my/repo
You
should see a lot of things fly by but it should finish without an error. In the
end you should have a directory named /srv/my/repo/repodata with at least 4
files in it. Maybe more.
To make
this repository known to yum you need to add a .repo file to your yum
configuration. On the systems where you want to use this repo you need to make
a new file in/etc/yum.repos.d/. The file can be named anything but the
extension on the file has to be .repo. Let's call this one 'myrepo.repo'.
In the
file you just need to include the following:
[myrepo]
name =
This is my repo
baseurl =
url://to/get/to/srv/my/repo/
That's
all you need in that file. The 'baseurl' line is the path that machine uses to
get to the repository. If the machine has direct access to it or mounts it as a
filesystem you can use a baseurl line like:
baseurl
= file:///srv/my/repo/
NB:
there are 3 slashes (/) following the file:, not 2. That is correct.
If you
access the file via an http or https server you would use something like:
baseurl
= http://servername/my/repo
More
details about client-side repo configuration can be found in the yum.conf man
page.
Now,
every time you modify, remove or add a new RPM package to /srv/my/repo you need
to recreate the repository metadata. You do that by running createrepo the same
way you did in step 2.
Recommended options
While
running plain createrepo on it's own will work, and is generally the most
compatible, it is recommended that you add extra options if you know you've
only got newer yum clients.
--database,
this creates the .sqlite databases on the server saving time on every client.
There is no downside to doing this, as older versions of yum will just ignore
the .sqlite files and get the .xml files.
--unique-md-filenames,
this names all the metadata files be uniquely. This is most useful if you are
using mirrors. Versions of yum before 3.2.10 will not clean up correctly.
--changelog-limit,
limit changelog entries to save on download time.
--deltas
--oldpackagedirs, this creates delta information, to save on download time.
Clients must have yum-presto installed to take advantage of this data.
More Advanced options
createrepo
--update: Sometimes you have a lot of packages in your repsitory and
regenerating the meta data for each package when only a few packages have been
added or changed is just too time consuming. This is where --update comes in
handy. You run createrepo just like you did before but you pass the --update
flag to it. Like this:
createrepo --update /srv/my/repo
Now,
createrepo will only update the items which have been changed, been added or
been removed since the last time the meta data was generated.
createrepo
-x package_file_name: Suppose you have a few packages in your repository
directory but you really don't want the unsuspecting world to see them. You can
exclude packages easily with createrepo:
createrepo
-x filename -x filename2 -x filename* /srv/my/repo
You can
sign a repository after it has been created by running:
gpg
--detach-sign --armor repodata/repomd.xml
This
will create a repomd.xml.asc file in the repodata directory which for modern
versions of yum this will allow yum to verify that the repository metadata came
from the owner of the gpg key.
You can
change the internal checksum used
createrepo --checksum /srv/my/repo
This
should only be needed if you are creating the repodata on a machine with a
newer version of python than on the clients (or one with python-hashlib
installed).
If you
want to learn more about using createrepo to create and maintain your own
package repository please see the createrepo man page or the other documents in
this collection.
Source: baseurl.org
