About

This project is designed to facilitate the use of private Yum repositories for managing packages for CentOS-based systems. The primary contents are RPM SPEC files and templated source files.

The templated source files are derived from upstream CentOS and Fedora/EPEL yum repository definition (*.repo) files. The upstream files are downloaded, copied out from their source RPM and then modified to become template files.

The .spec files included in this project use simple sed filters to convert the template *.repo files into "real" *.repo files that point to private yum repositories. The "real" *.repo – along with any other relevant files typically included in the upstream files – are then packaged up as RPMs. These RPMs can then be signed, distributed and installed as appropriate for a given private network.

Systems with the requisite RPMs installed can then fetch from local/private yum repository-mirrors as though they were fetching packages from their Internet-hosted/public analogues.

Usage

This project's file-layout is designed to foster the creation of RPMs. All RPM-related files are stored under the <PROJECT_ROOT>/rpmbuild directory-tree. The simplest method for creating RPMs is to do something like:

for SPEC in *.spec
do
   rpmbuild --define="_topdir <PROJECT_ROOT>/rpmbuild" \
     --define="my_privroot <REPO_ALIAS>" \
     --define "my_urlroot <REPO_HOST>" \
     --define="my_pathroot <REPO_PATH_ROOT>" -ba ${SPEC}
done

Where:

• PROJECT_ROOT: The fully-qualified path to this project as created by a git clone operation (e.g., /home/user/private-centos-repos)
• REPO_ALIAS: A short string to identify the internal repositories (e.g., internal)
• REPO_HOST: The fully-qualified domain name of the HTTP-reachable yum repository server (e.g. my-repo.my.domin)
• REPO_PATH_ROOT: The initial part of the repository-server URL's file-path (e.g., centos or yum/centos)

Once the rpmbuild operations complete, the resultant RPMs will be found in the <PROJECT_ROOT>/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch directory. If local site policies require RPMs to be GPG-signed, do so. The (signed) RPMs can then be uploaded to an appropriate yum server – or other repository – for distribution to CentOS-based clients.

Notes

Ensure that, if populating a yum server with the resultant RPMs, the yum server's metadata (and file-group definitions) are appropriately updated. Specifics for this are outside the scope of this document.

Testing

TravisCI

This project includes a .travis.yml file. Any time a commit – or group of commits – is pushed to GitHub, a test-job will be kicked off within the TravisCI service. This job:

1. Launches a build-host within TravisCI's environment
2. Installs and enables the Docker service
3. Downloads the GitHub project's contents to the build-host
4. Starts a CentOS 7 container from DockerHub, mapping the project contents into the container
5. Iterates over the various spec-files, and attempting to build throw-away RPMs

If RPMs are able to be created from each of the iterated spec-files, the test will return green. Failure to build from any given spec-file should cause the job to fail at the first-encountered build-error.

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Build Service	Build Status
TravisCI