Create a RHEL/CentOS local yum repo from the OS disk

Creating a local yum repository from the OS installer disk(s) (CD/DVD) can be useful in many situations where the machine doesn’t have Internet access to install additional packages. While the installer disk can still be used after the initial OS installation, it is more convenient to use a local repository especially if more than one machine need access to the packages.

This guide is for RHEL6.3 but it should work fairly well with other RHEL releases (e.g. RHEL 6.4), clones (CentOS 6.4) and RHEL-like distributions (Fedora).

 

step1: mount the OS disk and copy the contents to a local path which will be the main repository path:

mkdir -p /mnt/cd /opt/yum/rhel6.3/repodata
mount -o loop /dev/sr0 /mnt/cd
cp -a /mnt/cd/Packages/*.rpm /opt/yum/rhel6.3

 

step2: copy the main xml file from main repodata folder to the new repo path:

cp /mnt/cd/repodata/*comps*.xml /opt/yum/rhel6.3/repodata/comps.xml

 Note: This is not necessarily needed, but it is useful if you want to use yum to query / install package groups (e.g. yum grouplist).

 

step3: generate local repository files

cd /opt/yum/rhel6.3/
createrepo -g repodata/comps.xml .

Note: the createrepo RPM is available in the official RHEL/CentOS/Fedora repositories.

 

step4.1: create new yum repository (e.g. rhel-local.repo)

cat /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel-local.repo

[rhel6.3-local]
name=RHEL 6.3 local repository
baseurl=file:///opt/yum/rhel6.3/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
enabled=1

 

step4.2 (optional): store repository on a local FTP server

 

• copy /opt/yum/rhel6.3/ to the remote machine in its FTP path (e.g. /var/ftp/) and make sure FTP is reachable
• copy the RPM GPG key from /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release to the remote FTP path (e.g. /var/ftp/rhel6.3)
• create the repository file on the local machine (e.g. rhel-ftp.repo)

cat /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel-ftp.repo

[rhel6.3-ftp]
name=RHEL 6.3 FTP repository
baseurl=ftp://192.168.0.100/rhel6.3/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=ftp://192.168.0.100/rhel6.3/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
enabled=1

 

step5: test the repository

yum clean all
yum repolist

repo id                                                                                  repo name                                                                                             status
rhel6.3-ftp                                                                              RHEL 6.3 FTP repository                                                                               3,653
rhel6.3-local                                                                            RHEL 6.3 local repository                                                                             3,653

 

That’s it, both the local and the FTP yum repositories are now fully functional.