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.
Automatic Updates
RPM metadata is automatically calculated:
When deploying, removing, copying, and moving an RPM file.
When performing content import (both system and repository imports).
Manual Updates
You can manually invoke RPM metadata calculation using any of the following:
In Administration, click Repositories | Local. Select the repository for recalculation.
Click the three dots next to the repository, then click Recalculate Index.
Via Artifactory's REST API.
Note
Metadata calculation cleans up RPM metadata that already existed as a result of manual deployment or import. This includes RPM metadata stored as SQLite database files.
Index the File List
The filelists.xml metadata file of an RPM repository contains a list of all the files in each package hosted in the repository. When the repository contains many packages, reindexing this file as a result of interactions with the YUM client can be resource-intensive, resulting in degraded performance. Therefore, from version 5.4, reindexing this file is initially disabled when an RPM repository is created. To enable indexing filelists.xml, set the Enable File List Indexing checkbox.
Note that the filelists.xml metadata file for a virtual repository may not be complete (i.e. it may not list all the files it aggregates) if any of the repositories it aggregates do not have file listing enabled. Note that if indexing of the filelists.xml file is disabled, it is not possible to search for a file using the YUM client to determine which package wrote the queried file to the file system.