First option

Introduction

You may have some rpms that don’t fit into any particular repo. For example proprietary software that you use. Thus you may want to create a supplementary repo to put these in. I had a hunt around for documentation on this and could not find anything, so I just experimented and worked it out.

Based on a centos/el cobbler!

Steps

You may wish to do this from the command line but I found it easiest from cobbler web. Example is for yum/centos 6.

Click on Repos then New repo. Set arch to x86_64 and breed yum. Untick keep updated (not being synced from a remote repo). Give it a name (we called it el6-misc-x86_64 since this will work for all el6 varients such as rhel, centos, si-linux, etc, and we only use 64bit). Command line version of this:

# cobbler repo add --name=el6-misc-x86_64 --keep-updated=N --arch=x86_64 --mirror-locally=Y --breed=yum

Now create a dir to install the rpms; these go under /var/www/cobbler/repo_mirror:

# mkdir /var/www/cobbler/repo_mirror/el6-misc-x86_64 # same name as in the web page

Copy your rpms in there. Then run createrepo:

# createrepo /var/www/cobbler/repo_mirror/el6-misc-x86_64

You need to do a reposync; either click on Reposync or:

# cobbler reposync

You need to create a repo file, which will be copied over to /etc/yum.repos.d on your clients. It must be called config.repo:

# cat /var/www/cobbler/repo_mirror/el6-misc-x86_64/config.repo
[el6-misc]
name=el6 supplementary
baseurl=http://@@http_server@@/cobbler/repo_mirror/el6-misc-x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
priority=$yum_distro_priority

Now you need to attach the repo to you profile. Eg click on cent6u5. Under repos select el6-misc-x86_64 and click on the ». Command line version:

# cobbler profile edit --name=cent6u5 --repos='el6-misc-x86_64'

If you add or change the rpms in the repo, rerun the createrepo command.

This is how the repo looks from the command line:

# cobbler repo report --name=el6-misc-x86_64
Name                           : el6-misc-x86_64
Apt Components (apt only)      : []
Apt Dist Names (apt only)      : []
Arch                           : x86_64
Breed                          : yum
Comment                        :
Createrepo Flags               : <<inherit>>
Environment Variables          : {}
Keep Updated                   : False
Mirror                         :
Mirror locally                 : True
Owners                         : ['admin']
Priority                       : 99
RPM List                       : []
Yum Options                    : {}

Second option

Introduction

There is another approach for creating a local repository for use during installations.

I’m doing this using Cobbler 2.6.9 on a Scientific Linux 6x machine. (Should be the same as CentOS). I did this using the command line because I found some difficulties using the GUI to do the same thing.

Steps

Collect the RPMs into a staging area. It is from here that the reposync command will copy the files from:

# mkdir $PWD/myrpmstagearea/
# cp /my/private/rpms/* $PWD/myrpmstagearea/

Now create your repository entry in the cobbler system:

# cobbler repo add \
      --arch x86_64 \
      --breed rsync \
      --comment "Local copy of my RPMs." \
      --keep-updated No \
      --name myrpms \
      --mirror-locally Yes \
      --mirror $PWD/myrpmstagearea

Notes/Clarifications:

• The arch you should set as you need.
• The breed needs to be ‘rsync’ since this is how cobbler will copy over the files from your staging area to the internal storage.
• The use of keep-updated No means that when a reposync is called without specifying this repo specifically Cobbler will not try to copy over the RPMs again.
• mirror-locally Yes orders Cobbler to copy the files from the staging area to the internal storage.
• The mirror designation is of where you’ll be leaving the RPMs so that when reposync specifies this repo the files can be refreshed. If you remove a file/RPM from there it will be reflected in the internal Cobbler storage. N.B. You must use the full path to this location.
• The path of /my/private/rpms/* could be the same as your staging area but I didn’t want to do it that way.

The use of the createrepo command won’t need to be done manually since the reposync will do it for you and create all necessary files for you including the config.repo file that is needed.