Pulp is a platform for managing repositories of content, such as software packages, and pushing that content out to large numbers of consumers.

With Pulp you could easily create and manage local mirrors of upstream repositories for your systems or create repositories with custom content for your clients.

In this post we will see how we can use Pulp to create a local mirror of the upstream CentOS repositories, which can be used by our internal client systems.

First, let’s setup mirrors of the CentOS 7 base and updates repositories. This would give a bare minimum of packages that we can already provide to our client systems.

$ sudo pulp-admin rpm repo create \
        --repo-id=centos-7-x86_64-base \
        --description 'CentOS 7 Base Repo' \
        --display-name 'CentOS 7 Base Repo' \
        --feed=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/

And now we create a mirror of the updates repository.

$ sudo pulp-admin rpm repo create \
        --repo-id=centos-7-x86_64-updates \
        --description 'CentOS 7 Updates Repo' \
        --display-name 'CentOS 7 Updates Repo' \
        --feed=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/updates/x86_64/

You might also consider creating mirrors for other repositories as well, e.g. extras, centosplus, cr, fasttrack, etc. For more information about the available repositories for CentOS, please refer to the list of Available Repositories for CentOS.

Once you are done with setting up all repositories you need, you should consider creating a schedule for your repositories, so that you are in sync with the upstream repositories.

The command below creates a schedule for our CentOS 7 base repository to sync with the upstream repository once a day at midnight.

$ sudo pulp-admin rpm repo sync schedules create \
        --schedule 2015-11-08T00:00:00Z/P1DT \
        --repo-id centos-7-x86_64-base

Make sure to create a schedule for your other repositories as well.

Finally we can optionally start the sync from upstream if needed, by executing the command below.

$ sudo pulp-admin rpm repo sync run --repo-id centos-7-x86_64-base

And that is how easy it is to setup local mirrors of upstream repositories using Pulp.

Also make sure to check the official Pulp documentation for more information about Pulp and different recipes that you can use.