Building local mirrors of the EDB repositories

These instructions are for yum-based systems, such as RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and other RPM packaged systems.

Create the local yum repository

Install the packages yum-utils and createrepo:

dnf install yum-utils createrepo

Set up the enterprisedb repository on the server using the instructions in Getting started using repositories with the CLI.

Once the repository is configured, you can check the existence of the repository using dnf repolist.

The output looks similar to:

[~]$ dnf repolist
repo id repo name
enterprisedb-enterprise enterprisedb-enterprise
enterprisedb-enterprise-noarch enterprisedb-enterprise-noarch
enterprisedb-enterprise-source enterprisedb-enterprise-source

After the successful setup of the repository that you want to mirror, you can use dnf reposync to copy the repository to a local directory. You can pass a number of useful options to dnf reposync:

• --repoid — The repository id that can be found in the dnf repolist output.
• --download-metadata — Bypass the step of having to run createrepo.
• --arch — Filter the downloads based on a specified architecture.
• --remote-time — Attempt to maintain the timestamp on the packages.
• --newest-only — Download only the newest versions of the packages in the repository.
• --download-path — Specify the path to download the files to.

This example shows the use of dnf reposync. This example serves the repository usign on the apache server (httpd). It uses the download path of /var/www/html/repos/<repoid>, where <repoid> matches the repository id you're cloning.

sudo dnf reposync --repoid=enterprisedb-enterprise --download-metadata --arch=x86_64 --remote-time --newest-only --download-path=/var/www/html/repos/

After the command completes successfully, there are files in /var/www/html/repos/enterprisedb-enterprise. By default, SELinux blocks access to these files. To enable httpd to access these files, you can either run httpd in permissive mode or change the SELinux context of the files.

To change the SELinux context of the files:

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html/repos/enterprisedb-enterprise

To set httpd to permissive mode:

sudo systemctl stop httpd
sudo chcon -t bin_t /usr/sbin/httpd
sudo systemctl start httpd

You can now use a browser to view the directory. Using the terminal browser lynx (dnf install lynx), you can run:

lynx http://localhost/repos/enterprisedb-enterprise

The contents of the directory appear in the browser.

Viewing the web server from another system

To view the web server from another system, you might need to open port 80 on the firewall.

To do so, first check that the firewall is running:

sudo firewall-cmd --state

running

Then open the port:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=80/tcp

success

To apply the changes, reload the firewall:

sudo firewall-cmd --reload

success

You can now access the web server from other systems, enabling its use as a mirror.

Using the locally managed yum repository

To enable another host to install from the local mirror, you need to create a yum repository file in /etc/yum.repos.d/edb_local.repo. The contents can be as simple as this example:

[gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise]
name=gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
baseurl=http://gpc/repos/enterprisedb-enterprise/
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
sslverify=0
pkg_gpgcheck=0
autorefresh=1
type=rpm-md

To test that the packages are available from the local server, use dnf repo-pkgs {repoid} list:

dnf repo-pkgs gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise list

Last metadata expiration check: 0:01:12 ago on Thu Jul  4 12:43:56 2024.
Available Packages
SFCGAL.x86_64                                                 1.4.1-11.rhel9      gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
SFCGAL-devel.x86_64                                           1.4.1-11.rhel9      gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
SFCGAL-libs.x86_64                                            1.4.1-11.rhel9      gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
beacon-agent.x86_64                                           1.59.0-1            gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
edb-as12-advanced-storage-pack.x86_64                         1.0.3-1.el9         gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
edb-as12-advanced-storage-pack-debuginfo.x86_64               1.0.3-1.el9         gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
edb-as12-hdfs_fdw.x86_64                                      2.3.1-1.el9         gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise
...

As you can see, the packages available are the ones available from the locally managed yum repository. You can use this repository like any other yum repository.

Maintaining the locally managed repository

The locally managed repository needs relatively light maintenance. However, we recommend that you configure some mechanism to keep the locally managed yum repository up to date. The easiest option is to create a cron job that runs the relevant dnf reposync command.