Using Docker to create an ad hoc Yum repository

Docker can be used to quickly create and serve many services, one such example is serving RPMs via Yum in an ad hoc manner. Have you ever wanted to create a Yum repository consisting of some RPMs very quickly to be used for testing purposes? I did this week. I could have created the repo and installed a web server on any machine. But what if we had the RPMs and the Yum repository both dynamically hosted on the servers where the Chef cookbooks were being executed? That was my goal for the docker-yumrepo project, enabling the creation of an ad hoc Yum repository.

This tool has prerequisites that createrepo_c and docker to be installed prior. You will place the RPMs you want in the repo in the src directory(after running ‘make src’), then it will build and runs a docker image. This will serve the repository on port 80 (so make sure you don’t have another webserver on port 80.) Voila, you now have a yum repository accessible on the URL:

http://localhost/docker-yumrepo

To use this you can install a Yum repo config file such as:

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[user@centos docker-yumrepo]$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/docker-yumrepo.repo
[docker-yumrepo]
name=docker-yumrepo
baseurl=http://localhost/docker-yumrepo
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Instructions are also available in the README.

Enjoy!