RCSA: Creating Your Own Repository

I can be useful to know how to create your own repository if you want to test setting up and working with repositories. This allows you to put your own RPMs in a directory and publish that directory as a repository. It is also useful to know how to do this if you have installed RHEL and not connected it to RHN, which means that you would not have any repositories at all.

You need to copy all RPM packages to a directory that you want to use as a repository, and after doing that, you need to use the createrepo  command to generate the metadata that enables you to use that directory as a repository.

Step by step instructions

1. Install the createrepo RPM package if it is not already installed:

   yum -y install createrepo

2. Copy ISO image to your server. Put it, for example at /var/ISO directory
3. Mount the downloaded ISO on the /mnt directory. for example

   mount -o loop /var/ISO/centos75.iso /mnt

4. Copy the content into, say srv directory

   cp -rp /mnt /srv

   that will create directory /srv/mnt with all files that ISO contains

   [0]d620@ROOT:/srv/local_centos75 # ll
   total 328K
   drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root   35 May  3  2018 EFI/
   drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root   57 May  3  2018 images/
   drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  198 May  3  2018 isolinux/
   drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root   43 May  3  2018 LiveOS/
   drwxrwxr-x. 2 root root 216K May  3  2018 Packages/
   drwxrwxr-x. 2 root root 4.0K May  3  2018 repodata/
   -rw-rw-r--. 1 root root   14 May  2  2018 CentOS_BuildTag
   -rw-r--r--. 1 root root   29 May  3  2018 .discinfo
   -rw-rw-r--. 1 root root  227 Aug 30  2017 EULA
   -rw-rw-r--. 1 root root  18K Dec  9  2015 GPL
   -rw-rw-r--. 1 root root 1.7K Dec  9  2015 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7
   -rw-rw-r--. 1 root root 1.7K Dec  9  2015 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Testing-7
   -r--r--r--. 1 root root 2.9K May  3  2018 TRANS.TBL
   -rw-r--r--. 1 root root  354 May  3  2018 .treeinfo

5. Now rename it to the desirable name for your repository, for example local_centos7

   mv /srv/mnt /srv/local_centos75

6. convert the content  of  /srv/local_centos75 into repository using the command:

   createrepo /srv/local_centos75

   [0]d620@ROOT:/etc/yum.repos.d # createrepo /srv/local_centos75
   Spawning worker 0 with 1986 pkgs
   Spawning worker 1 with 1985 pkgs
   Workers Finished
   Saving Primary metadata
   Saving file lists metadata
   Saving other metadata
   Generating sqlite DBs
   Sqlite DBs complete

   This command generates the repository metadata, which allows you to use this repository for yum

7. Create the file describing  this repository in the /etc/yum.repos.d.  The name can  be arbitrary but  should have the extension  .repo, for example CentOS-75-local.repo

   The file should have the  following contents:

   [local]
   name=CentOS-75-local
   baseurl=file:///srv/local_centos7
   gpgcheck=0

   NOTE: Label like [local] above should be unique to this set of repo files. You can't use already used labels like [base]
    

8. Type yum repolist  to verify the availability of the newly created repository.

Sources of RRMs for you private repository can be other then ISO

We have mounted the ISO file of the installation disk to copy files from it. Alternative  way to get repository files is by using the yumdownloader utility. This utility enables you to download list of packages directly from the repository to the current directory. For instance, type yumdownloader nmap  to download the nmap RPM package to the current directory.

You can also you wget to replicate existing repositories.

Verifying Repository Availability with yum repolist

# yum repolist

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Last modified: April 11, 2019