Creating a yum repository (repo) and Creating a yum group to install + kickstart

Creating a yum repository is fairly easy, the only command you need is createrepo and some rpms. This is a quick guide to making a repo, I have a more complete example in my howto make an install server.

Make a directory to contain your rpms, it's nice to name the directory the same as the repo name. Even better, segregate the rpms by architecture, i386, i686, noarch, SRPMS, etc. Copy the rpms into the appropriate directories and run create repo on that directory. Ensure you sign your rpms with your gpg key.
Example: [user@machine] mkdir -p MyRepo/i386 MyRepo/noarch MyRepo/i686 MyRepo/SRPMS [user@machine] mv myrpm.noarch.rpm MyRepo/noarch [user@machine] mv myrpm.src.rpm MyRepo/SRPMS [user@machine] mv mybinrpm.i386.rpm MyRepo/i386 [user@machine] createrepo MyRepo

Groups File (comps.xml)

Now, if you want to install all the rpms in your repo, or a specific subset, you'll need to create a groups file otherwise known as comps.xml. For our example, if we wanted myrpm.noarch.rpm to be installed by default and mybinrpm.i386.rpm to be an optional install, we would create a comps.xml file like this: mygroup MyGroup true Default RPMS from MyRepo true myrpm mybinrpm Now we need to rerun createrepo so that clients will know our group assignments. [user@machine] createrepo -g comps.xml MyRepo

/etc/yum.repos.d

Now, if we want to install this group on a machine, we create a .repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d like this: [MyRepo] name=My Repository baseurl=http://path/to/MyRepo gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-MyRepo If you didn't sign your rpms and do not wish to verify signatures, set gpgcheck=0 in your .repo file. If you did sign your rpms, then you'll need to export your gpg key into a file so yum can import the file into the rpm database.

Exporting your GPG-Key for RPM/YUM

First, find the name of your key if you don't already know it. Then export the key into a file: Then move this file to the location specified in the .repo file. Yum will install the key into the rpm database for you. To install the key manually, you can do the following: We can see that our key (gpg-pubkey-79e7e0db-470a4258) was installed into the rpm database).

Now, to install this group. [user@machine] yum groupinstall mygroup This will install any default or mandatory rpms as listed in comps.xml, any optional rpms will not be installed.

Kickstart

To install our packages via kickstart, we'll need to add the repo to our kickstart file repo --name=MyRepo --baseurl=http://path/to/MyRepo