RPM Repositories

Artifactory is a fully-fledged RPM repository. As such, it enables:

The RPM metadata generated by Artifactory is identical to the basic-mode output of the Red Hat-based Linux command createrepo.

A folder named repodata is created in the configured location within a local repository with the following files in it:

When enabled, the metadata calculation is triggered automatically by some actions, and can also be invoked manually by others. Either way, the metadata produced is served to YUM clients.

To create an RPM local repository, in the Administration module go to Repositories | Repositories | Local,click New Local Repository and select RPM as the Package Type.

Local Repositories

To enable automatic RPM metadata calculation on a local RPM repository, in the RPM Settings section of the Basic settings screen, set Auto-calculate RPM Metadata.

Field	Description
RPM Metadata Folder Depth	Informs Artifactory under which level of directory to search for RPMs and save the repodata directory. By default this value is 0 and refers to the repository's root folder. In this case, Artifactory searches the entire repository for RPMs and saves the repodata directory at $REPO-KEY/repodata. Using a different depth is useful in cases where generating metadata for a repository separates its artifacts by name, version and architecture. This will allow you to create multiple RPM repositories under the same Artifactory RPM repository. For example: If the repository layout is similar to that shown below and you want to generate RPM metadata for every artifact divided by name, set the Depth to 1 and the repodata directory is saved at REPO_ROOT/ARTIFACT_NAME/repodata : REPO_ROOT/$ARTIFACT_NAME/$ARTIFACT_VERSION/$ARCHITECTURE/FILE_NAME - or - rpm-local/foo/1.0/x64/foo-1.0-x64.rpmm Note When changing the configured depth of existing repository, packages indexed in the old depth might need to be re-indexed or moved to a new depth to be available in the new configured depth, and YUM clients might need to change their configuration to point to the new depth.depth.
Auto-calculate RPM Metadata	When set, RPM metadata calculation is automatically triggered by the actions described above.
Enable File List Indexing	When set, RPM metadata calculation will also include indexing the filelists.xml metadata file.
RPM Group File Names	A comma-separated list of YUM group files associated with your RPM packages. Note that at each level (depth), the repodata directory in your repository may contain a different group file name, however each repodata directory may contain only 1 group metadata file (multiple groups should be listed as different tags inside the XML file. For more details, see YUM Documentation).

Virtual Repositories

A Virtual Repository defined in Artifactory aggregates packages from both local and remote repositories.

This allows you to access both locally hosted RPM packages and remote proxied RPM repositories from a single URL defined for the virtual repository.

To define a virtual YUM repository, from the Administration module, go to Repositories | Repositories | Virtual, set the Package Type to be RPM, and select the underlying local and remote RPM repositories to include in the Basic settings tab.

Note

When using virtual RPM repositories, Artifactory does not support using YUM or DNF commands that use the updateinfo.xml metadata file.

To allow deploying packages to this repository, set the Default Deployment Repository.

Artifactory supports using a GPG key to sign RPM metadata repositories (not packages) for authentication by the YUM client.

To generate a pair of GPG keys and upload them to Artifactory, see Managing Signing Keys.Manage Signing Keys

After configuring the rpm-local repository in Artifactory, you need to configure your local machine to install software packages from it by executing the following steps:

Now, every RPM file deployed to the root of the rpm-local repository can be installed using:

yum install <package_name>

Once you have configured your local machine to install RPM packages from your RPM local repository, you may also deploy RPM packages to the same repository using the UI or using the REST API.JFrog REST APIs

Through the REST API you also have the option to deploy by checksum or deploying from an archive.Deploy Artifact by ChecksumDeploy Artifacts from Archive

For example, to deploy an RPM package into a repository called rpm-local you could use the following:

curl -u<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD> -XPUT http://localhost:8080/artifactory/rpm-local/<PATH_TO_METADATA_ROOT> -T <TARGET_FILE_PATH>

where PATH_TO_METADATA_ROOT specifies the path from the repository root to the deploy folder.

You can deploy RPM modules to the repodata folder using the modules.yaml file which contains all the desired modules and then proceed to trigger a repository index to update the repomd.xml and other metadata files with the modules information.

A YUM group is a set of RPM packages collected together for a specific purpose. For example, you might collect a set of "Development Tools” together as a YUM group.

A group is specified by adding a group XML file to same directory as the RPM packages included in it. The group file contains the metadata of the group including pointers to all the RPM files that make up the group.

Artifactory supports attaching a YUM Group file to the YUM calculation essentially mimicking the createrepo -g command.

A group file can also be created by running the following command:

sudo yum-groups-manager -n "My Group" --id=mygroup --save=mygroups.xml --mandatory yum glibc rpm

You can use and reference the following built-in variables in yum commands and in all YUM configuration files (i.e. /etc/yum.conf and all .repo files in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory):

The following code block is an example of how your /etc/yum.conf file might look:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
[comments abridged]

You can view all the metadata that annotates an RPM by choosing it in Artifactory's tree browser and selecting the RPM Info tab.

Watch this short screencast to learn how easy it is to host RPMs in Artifactory.