Custom Yum Repos

If you have gotten your development team to do releases in rpm format you already won half the battle. So here is a quick Howto on setting up custom Yum repos. So in this example I took the RHEL 5.2 CDROM and created my own repo for all the packages on the CD. It takes care of all the basic stuff for using yum and gets ride of the nasty rpm dependencies.

Note that this works for custom repos anywhere you want to put rpm packages that can be part of the OS or custom RPMS for company releases repo.

First things make sure apache is installed or install it from the media.

rpm -ivh /mnt/cdrom/server/httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_1.3.i386.rpm
rpm -hiv /mnt/cdrom/server/yum*

Then you will need to pull this package from dags website.

rpm -ivh http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/createrepo/createrepo-0.4.8-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm

Now copy the server directory of all the rpms to
cp /mnt/cdrom/server/*.* /var/www/html/server/
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/server/
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/server/

Nows lets build the repo xml files
cd /var/www/html/server
createrepo .

Now comes the interesting part - now we need to add the yum repo to yum's repositories.

You can use this file as a template and distribute to all your servers. A good idea is to use my rpm building script to make a custom rpm package. Tar up all your repos from a tar up /etc/yum.repos.d. Create the rpm and add it to your kickstart install.

Script is here

[My Repo]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch - Debug
baseurl=http://yoursever.yourdoamin.org/server
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
#gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release

Save it to /etc/yum.repos.d/my.repo

Now lets restart yum update demon.
service restart yum-updatesd

Now lets run the yum command to test it.

yum list ruby*

There a fully functional yum repository.