Making a simple Yum repository.

Here is some low hanging fruit to improve your RHEL environment and simplify your work… setup a simple Yum repository.

 

There is very little magic involved in getting a yum repository up and running. You just need a web server and createrepo.

yum -y install createrepo httpd

Give your repo a home.

mkdir -p /path/to/repo/MyRepo

Go ahead and setup a vhost for the repo.

cat <<EOF > /etc/httpd/conf.d/repo.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName repo.example.com
ServerAlias repo
ServerAdmin ops@example.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/repo/
ErrorLog logs/repo.example.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/repo.example.com-access_log common
<Directory "/path/to/repo/*">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
EOF

And fire it up.

/etc/init.d/httpd start

Now, dump your RPMs there and run createrepo. It scans the RPMs in the directory and makes the proper metadata resources.

mv *.rpm /path/to/repo/MyRepo
createrepo /path/to/repo/MyRepo

Everytime you add or remove rpms, re-runit.

Now on each node drop a .repo file pointing at your repository.

cat <<EOF_REPO > /etc/yum.repos.d/MyRepo.repo
[MyRepo]
name=MyRepo
baseurl=http://repo.example.com/MyRepo
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF_REPO

You can also make a hierarchy like /path/to/repo/MyRepo/5/x86_64 and in the .repo file’s baseurl directive add something like:
baseurl=http://repo.example.com/MyRepo/$releasever/$basearch
will exapnd to http://repo.example.com/MyRepo/5/x86_64.

Now, you may want to setup priorities. If you want to host RPMs for stuff that may also be in other repos there may be conflicts. You can enforce a policy using yum priorities as to which repo wins out.

yum -y install yum-priorities

Then in your repo files set a priority, 1-99 (1 having the highest priority) where repos with no priroty set defaults to 99.

In my internal repo I set it to priority=1 and the MySQL 5.5.21 RPMs we grabbed from Oracle win out over the 5.0.95 RPMs in the CentOS updates repo.

There are a lot of more fun options but the stuff above should be just enough to get you going.