How to Setup a Network Repository to Install or Update Packages – Part 11

Configuring the Client Machine

You can add the configuration files for custom repositories in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. Configuration files need to end in .repo and follow the same basic structure.

[repository_name]
Description
URL

Most likely, there will be already other .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d. To properly test your repository, you can either delete those configuration files (not really recommended, since you may need them later) or rename them, as I did, by appending .orig to each file name:

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# for i in $(ls *.repo); do mv $i $i.orig; done

In our case, we will name our configuration file as tecmint.repo and insert the following lines:

[tecmint]
name=Example repo for Part 11 of the LFCE series on Tecmint.com
baseurl=http://192.168.0.17/repos/centos/6/6/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6

In addition, we have enabled GPG signature-checking for all packages in our repository.

Using the Repository

Once the client has been properly configured, you can issue the usual yum commands to query the repository. Note how yum info subversion indicates that the information about the package is coming from our newly created repository:

# yum info subversion

Or you can install or update an already installed package:

# yum { install | update } package

For example,

# yum update && yum install subversion

Keeping the Repository Up-to-date

To make sure our repository is always current, we need to synchronize it with the online repositories on a periodic basis. We can use rsync for this task as well (as explained in Part 6 of the LFCS series.

rsync allows us to synchronize two directories, one local and one remote). Run the rsync command that was used to initially download the repository through a cron job and you’re good to go. Remember to set the cron job to a time of the day when the update will not cause a negative impact in the available bandwidth.

For example, if you want to update your repository every day beginning at 2:30 AM:

30 2 * * * rsync -avz rsync://centos.ar.host-engine.com/6.6/os/x86_64/ /var/www/html/repos/centos/6/6/ 

Important: Make sure to execute above command on the CentOS 7 server to keep your repository.

Of course, you can put that line inside a script to do more complex and customized tasks before or after performing the update. Feel free to experiment and tell me about the results.

Conclusion

You should never underestimate the importance of a local or network repository given the many benefits it brings as I explained in this article. If you can afford the disk space, this is definitely the way to go. I look forward to hearing from you and don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.