How to setup local Yum repository in Fedora 8

The advantage of running a local repository is to save bandwidth. With this method you can distribute RPMs across your network from a central server and only worry about keeping your server in sync with the other Fedora mirrors.

1) Install Apache web server: yum install httpd and start it: /etc/init.d/httpd start
2) Install a tool to index your repo: yum install createrepo
3) Now is the time to download the Fedora repository. If you have the install DVD you can copy the contents from there, however it only contains a limited set of packages. If you want everything then download it from a good mirror server.

In this case I used rsync but you can also use http or ftp protocol and download using wget command.

rsync -avrt rsync://rsync.muug.mb.ca/fedora-enchilada/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/ /var/www/html/yum/base/8/i386

The RPMs will be located in your apache web root folder /var/www/html/yum/base/8/i386

4) Index the repo: createrepo /var/www/html/yum/base/8/i386
5) Now we need to tell yum to use the local repo. Edit the yum.conf file: nano /etc/yum.conf and append this information:

[base-local]
name=Fedora 8 - i386
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http:///yum/base/$releasever/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

6) To confirm that we have everything setup run these commands:

yum repolist
output:

repo id repo name status
base-local Fedora 8 - i386 enabled
fedora Fedora 8 - i386 enabled
livna Livna for Fedora Core 8 - i386 - Base enabled
updates Fedora 8 - i386 - Updates enabled


base-local is enabled and we can now start using it.

Lists all imported packages on the local repo.
yum list all --disablerepo=fedora,updates,livna

Installs liferea from the local repo. Note that if you don't disable the internet repo and yum finds a later version of liferea online it will try to download that instead.

yum install liferea --disablerepo=fedora,updates,livna