Let’s suppose that you want to test a package not yet landed in the Fedora repos, include it in the installation process or in a Live CD (more on a future post).

A local DNF repository for testing purposes

Let’s go

Install these two packages:

sudo dnf install createrepo koji

The first creates the metadata for your local repository, the latter is useful to download packages from the Fedora build system (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koji).

Go for instance to https://koji.fedoraproject.org and look for the new package to test. Look for the buid ID and download the related RPMs using the koji client.

Create and go to the directory from where you want to serve the RPMs, for instance /var/tmp/localrepo

mkdir /var/tmp/localrepo && cd $_ koji download-build -a x86_64 1065702

Now you should have all the RPMs related to the selected build ID inside such directory.

Let’s create the repository metadata

From inside the aforementioned directory issue the createrepo command:

cd /var/tmp/localrepo createrepo .

Serve it via HTTP

Since this is a temporary configuration, just a test, there is no need to sign the repo, and no need to install and configure a webserver like Apache or Nginx.

You can use node.js or Python. Always from inside the aforementioned directory, issue:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

An http server will start listening on port 8000

Test the repository

You must add a repository config file, like this

sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/local-test.repo

[local-test]
name=Fedora 28 - $basearch
baseurl=http://127.0.0.1:8000/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0

Now you can test if it is all ok.

dnf repository-packages local-test list

You should see a list of the RPMs previously downloaded from koji.