A S3 plugin for yum.

Motivation

It is very convenient to run a yum-repository on S3. S3 frees you from running your own webserver. You also dont have to worry about scalability when tons of servers update.

createrepo and the awesome s3cmd, is all you need. However, this only works for public repositories ...

Public vs. protected repositories

Public repositories

S3 bucket can be make public. Public buckets can be accessed with plain http.

• enable "website feature" of your s3 bucket
• you dont need the s3-plugin. Everything works out of the box.

Protected repositories

This is where yum-s3 kicks in. yum-s3 uses the Boto library to fetch objects from S3, which allows using credentials.

Build

• see http://code.google.com/p/fwtemplates/
• run ./bootstrap ; ./build

Install

• run make package-rpm
• get the RPM in fw-pkgout

How to configure a S3 based repo

[repoprivate-pool-noarch]
name=repoprivate-pool-noarch
baseurl=http://<YOURBUCKET>.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/<YOURPATH>
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
priority=1
s3_enabled=1
key_id=<YOURKEY>
secret_key=<YOURSECRET>

put this into a .repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/

YUM edge cases (baseurl)

The is a flaw/issue/bug in yum, that stops yum-s3 from working, when you use a createrepo with a baseurl.

Why should I want to do this?

Suppose you have different environments (CI, testing, production). You want to upload the RPM only once to save outgoing bandwidth. Normally you could create symlinks on a webserver, but this is not possible with S3. But Yum offers a dedicated feature (baseurl), what can be used to make this possible.

Repository layout with "pool"

repo/
     pool/
          i386/
               myprogram-1.0.rpm
               myprogram-1.1.rpm
               myprogram-1.2.rpm
     env/
         CI/
            myprogram-1.2.rpm -> ../../pool/i386/myprogram-1.2.rpm
         testing/
            myprogram-1.1.rpm -> ../../pool/i386/myprogram-1.1.rpm
         production/
            myprogram-1.0.rpm -> ../../pool/i386/myprogram-1.0.rpm

So when you add a RPM to a repository, you do the following steps

• add the RPM to the /pool directory
• create a symlink in the folder (like CI, testing, production)
• run createrepo with the --baseurl option

This will create the yum xml-files based on the symlinks that are present. So you can decide with the symlinks at createrepo-time, which packages are "visible".

Giving the --baseurl option to yum will make yum go the /pool directory to fetch the actual RPM.

How do I make yum honour the baseurl?

There is a patch to yum (version 3.2.29 that ships with SL6). See https://github.com/jbraeuer/yum-s3

Have fun!