Software packages and repositories

Software packages and repositories is my first stop in automating the OS life cycle, the OS image including all software stacks, os, middleware, management, and application should represent a fixed state. that would difficult to track if installs were done ad-hoc outside of a packaging system. so for us we use mainly RHEL based distros. so you think the answer would be use yum, and rpms!!! well there are Java applications as jars. there are Ruby gems, there are python eggs, and there are git clones and tarballs. one answer is use fpm to convert from any format to rpm.

• so one challenge is the diversity of packaging types and how to standardise on one.  
• Second, comes the Internet isolation and state, at work we are not allowed downloads directly from the net. 

So for this second problem i need to have a way to mirror publicly accessed or Enterprise provided repos to internal repos. the easiest choice is to mirror every thing and copy it/rysnc it over to work periodically.

for Ruby Gems here is the simplest way to do it :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8411045/how-to-build-a-rubygems-mirror-server

$ gem install rubygems-mirror




Edit the YAML configuration file ~/.gem/.mirrorrc:




---
- from: http://rubygems.org
  to: ~/.gem/mirror

the to: filed above can be better pointing to a usb storage, where ever it points at 

$ mkdir ~/.gem/mirror

Start mirroring:

$ gem mirror

Once mirroring finishes edit ~/.gem/mirror/config.ru:

require "rubygems"
require "geminabox"

Geminabox.data = "./"
run Geminabox

Install Gem in a box:

$ gem install geminabox

Start gem server:

$ cd ~/.gem/mirror
$ rackup

Edit your application's Gemfile to use your gem server:

source "http://your.servers.ip:9292"