Introduction
This article at is the logical continuation of our PXE article, because after reading this you will be able to network boot AND actually install the distribution of your choice. But there are other uses of creating your own repository. For example, bandwidth. If you manage a network and all the systems (or some) are running the same distribution, it’s easier for you to just rsync in conjunction with a nearby mirror and serve updates yourself. Next, maybe you have some packages created by you that your distro won’t accept in the main tree, but the users find them useful. Get a domain name, set up a webserver and there you go. We will not detail the setup of a webserver here, just basic installation tasks and the basic setup of a repository for Fedora or Debian systems. Hence you are expected to have the necessary hardware (the server and the necessary network equipment, depending on the situation) and some knowledge about Linux and webservers. So, let’s start.
NOTE:This article was moved from our previous domain linuxcareer.com.
Creating a repository on Fedora systems
Installing the tools
Fedora has a tool called createrepo which simplifies the task at hand. So, all we need to install is that and httpd as the webserver:
# yum install createrepo httpd
Setting up the repositories
Now, after setting up your webserver, we will assume that the root directory is ar /var/www. We have to create the necessary directories in an organized matter (feel free to adjust to taste if necessary or just follow the official layout):
# cd /var/www/html
# mkdir -p fedora/15/x86_64/base
# mkdir fedora/15/x86_64/updates
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