Setting up a private mirror

Sometimes it is sufficient to simply use a mirror on the Internet. However, there are situations where a local mirror can be useful. When you have a lot of servers accessing the repository, want to control the package updates exactly or when your production servers just can’t access the internet at all, a local mirror is necessary.

To set up the mirror you should use rsync as it can update your local copy quickly and with low bandwidth use and also preserves hardlinks. Not all mirrors provide access via the rsync protocol, please consult our list of mirrors.

To make a full copy of the OpenCSW repository, first make sure you have rsync on your system:

sudo pkgutil -y -i rsync

Then copy the files:

sudo mkdir -p /export/mirror/opencsw
sudo chown $LOGNAME /export/mirror/opencsw
rsync -aH --delete rsync://rsync.opencsw.org/opencsw/ /export/mirror/opencsw

The directory opencsw-mirror can either be shared via HTTP or via NFS to the pkgutil clients. Use http://myserver/opencsw-mirror/ for HTTP and file:///myserver/opencsw-mirror for NFS as mirror option in pkgutil‘s configuration file /etc/opt/csw/pkgutil.conf.