I’ve recently needed to create a local mirror of Cent7 packages. I followed the guide posted on techmint but also made a few tweaks to get it to work to my liking.

Create local repo mirror

• Install necessary packages
  • sudo yum -y install epel-release nginx createrepo yum-utils moreutils
• Create directories that will host your repo
  • sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/{base,centosplus,extras,updates,epel}
• Use the reposync tool to synchronize to those local directories (repeat for each directory, changing repoid= value to match)
  • reposync -g -l -d -m --repoid=base --newest-only --download-metadata --download_path=/usr/share/nginx/html/repos/
• Use the createrepo tool to create repodata
  • base & epel have a group file, other repos do not.
  • For base & epel:
    • createrepo -g comps.xml /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/<FOLDER>
  • For the rest:
    • createrepo /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/<FOLDER>

Configure daily synchronization via cron

Copy this script to /etc/cron.daily/ and give it execute rights

#!/bin/bash
##specify all local repositories in a single variable
LOCAL_REPOS="base extras updates epel centosplus"
##a loop to update repos one at a time
for REPO in ${LOCAL_REPOS}; do
reposync -g -l -d -m --repoid=$REPO --newest-only --download-metadata --download_path=/usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/
if [[ $REPO = 'base' || $REPO = 'epel' ]]; then
        createrepo -g comps.xml /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/$REPO/
else
        createrepo /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/$REPO/
fi
done

chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/<script_name>

E-mails from cron became annoying. I wanted to only get e-mailed on error. The solution is to use chronic

Modify /etc/anacrontab to add “chronic” between nice and run-parts

1 5 cron.daily nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.daily
7 25 cron.weekly nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly 45 cron.monthly nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

Success.

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Update 4/25/19 I encountered an issue while trying to use repsync to mirror the remi repo.

warning: /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/remi/remi/aspell-nl-0.50-1.el7.remi.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 00f97f56: NOKEY

I found out from here that it means you need to manually import the package’s key into the RPMDB like so

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi