that's yum mmmy!

Hello everyone!

I've been pretty sparse lately, and today's topic is pretty light, but Today I Learned (TIL) that puppet has a yum repository resource!  While I was trying to figure out if they had a augeas lens for the type of ini file that the format is stored in, I was very happy to find a native type in base puppet!

One feature that caught my eye is that there is a value of s3_enabled...

s3_enabled

(Property: This attribute represents concrete state on the target system.)

Access the repository via S3. Valid values are: False/0/No or True/1/Yes. Set this toabsent to remove it from the file completely.

Valid values are absent. Values can match /^(True|False|0|1|No|Yes)$/i.

(↑ Back to yumrepo attributes)

This has me intrigued, since we are working in AWS.  Does this mean that we can create a repository as flat flies in an s3 bucket?

I found this amazing article on setting up s3 based yum repos using IAM authorization...

So, does it work!?

Yes and no.... According to this Pull Request, The plugin only supports IAM Signature version 2, which is only in place for older AWS regions.  Newer regions only support IAM signature version 4.. Regions like China, Frankfurt, etc..   So only certain areas will be able to use the plugin as is.

I have tried duplicating the steps of the article on both a N. Virginia and a Frankfurt instance, and everything worked correctly in N. VA, and I had the same error as the pull request (400) when trying to use both yum-s3-iam and yum-s3-plugin.    I have a really rough github project here which I used to aid my setup.  I had to 'yum install -y git puppet3', clone my repository, and run my init script, then run sudo puppet apply ~/s3-repo-sandbox/s3_plugin.pp to apply my changes.  I had pre-setup a bucket named dawiest-repo, in which I placed a noarch repository created similar to the above article.


Assuming you can get the above plugin to work for your region..... how can you make sure your repos are set up before any packages are installed?  You could directly add require parameters to each package that needs it, but it is probably better to use the 'spaceship operator' to collect all the references and create the require entries for you!

http://serverfault.com/a/461869

Although stages can handle this and so can specific yum repo dependencies, better is to declare the relationship generically.

Just put Yumrepo <| |> -> Package <| provider != 'rpm' |> in your puppet manifest.

node default {
  Yumrepo <| |> -> Package <| provider != 'rpm' |>
}

This makes it so that all yumrepo types will get processed before any packages that don't have 'rpm' as their provider. That latter exclusion is so that I can use the (for example) epel-release RPM package to help install the yum repo.

Also, this article give a good description of the process needed for setting up gpg keys for your repo!