Building local mirrors of the EDB repositories

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The following 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 using the following command

dnf install yum-utils createrepo

Setup the enterprisedb repository on the server as per the instructions in Getting started with CLI.

Once 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

With the successful setup of the repository that we want to mirror, we can now use dnf reposync to copy the repository to a local directory. There are a number of useful options that can be passed to dnf reposync:

  • --repoid - This is the repository id which can be found in the dnf repolist output.
  • --download-metadata - This bypasses the step of having to run createrepo.
  • --arch - You can filter the downloads based on a specified architecture.
  • --remote-time - This will attempt to maintain the timestamp on the packages.
  • --newest-only - Only download the newest versions of the packages in the repository.
  • --download-path - Specify the path to download the files to.

Here is an example in the use of dnf reposync. In this example, we are going to serve the repository usign the apache server (httpd) and use the download path of

/var/www/html/repos/{repoid} where {repoid} matches the repository id we are cloning.

So the command would be:

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

You should now see files in /var/www/html/repos/enterprisedb-enterprise if this command is successful. By default, SELinux blocks access to these files. To enable httpd to access these files, you can use either run httpd in permissive mode or change the SELinux context of the files. To change the SELinux context of the files, use the following command:

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

To set httpd to permissive mode, use the following command:

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

And you will see the contents of the directory in the browser.

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

Check that the firewall is running.

sudo firewall-cmd --state
Output
running

Then open the port.

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

Then reload the firewall to apply the changes,.

sudo firewall-cmd --reload
Output
success

You are now able to 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 the example shown below:

[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

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

dnf repo-pkgs gpc-enterprisedb-enterprise list
Output
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 packages available from the locally managed yum repository, and you can use this repository like any other yum repository.

Maintaining the locally managed repository

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

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