Features

RPM Support includes a number of features that are not found in the generic Pulp platform, the most important of which are described below.

Types

Pulp RPM supports the following types:

  • RPM
  • DRPM
  • SRPM
  • Erratum
  • Distribution
  • Package Group
  • Package Category

Errata

Red Hat provides security, bug fix, and enhancement updates for supported Red Hat Enterprise products. These security updates are provided through the Red Hat CDN, and are described by errata. Pulp supports these errata types with a number of related features.

Errata are synchronized from upstream repositories. Errata can also be copied from one repository to another. Administrators can also upload their own errata to a repository. Please see the Recipes documentation to learn how to perform these operations.

Modularity

Pulp supports the following modularity repository mirroring use cases:

  • synchronization of the modularity metadata content, the repodata/*modules.yaml.gz file, with either immediate or on-demand synchronization
  • publication of the modularity metadata with the repository publication
  • copy of the modularity metadata with the repository copy
  • modules published through Pulp are consumable by the dnf client

Note

Filtering content types subsets might require one to explicitly include the metafile in their copy filter criteria, should they want the resulting content subset to include the modularity metadata.

Note

Because the modularity metadata is never processed by Pulp, it is possible for a consumer to experience discrepancies between the available modules (metadata) and the content available.

Boolean (rich) dependencies

Pulp supports RPM content with boolean dependencies in these basic repository and content management use cases:

  • synchronization, publication and content upload
  • copying content between repositories
  • displaying boolean dependencies
  • providing the content to the dnf client to process boolean dependencies

Note

Pulp doesn’t actually process boolean dependencies. A recursive copy might therefore not work properly for content that utilizes those.

Protected Repositories

Red Hat protects its repositories with SSL-based entitlement certificates. Pulp supports both ends of that operation:

Each Pulp repository can be configured with a client entitlement certificate and key that it will use to retrieve packages from a remote repository. This is only required when the remote repository is protected, such as when connecting to the Red Hat CDN.

Pulp can be supplied a CA certificate that it will use to verify the authenticity of client certificates when clients try to access Pulp-hosted repositories. This is only required when you want to protect a Pulp-hosted repository. Repositories can have these protection settings specified individually, or they can be set globally for all RPM-related repositories.

For each Pulp-hosted repository that is protected, a consumer certificate can be supplied that will be distributed to consumers when they bind. That certificate will allow them to access the protected repository.

Package Signatures and GPG Key ID Filtering

RPM repositories have limited support for acting on package GPG signatures, including requiring packages to have GPG signatures, and whitelisting signing key IDs to only sync packages with matching signing key IDs. The signing key ID filtering feature uses the 8-character “short” key ID, which does not uniquely identify a GPG signing key. This feature does not verify package signatures.

This signature filtering is granted within the current importer settings and current import of the content, without taking into consideration content already present in the repository.

These features cannot be enable with on_demand or background download policies, since access to the package files is required to get the GPG signature information. Only the immediate download policy is compatible with signature filtering.

Export

In addition to publishing repositories as normal yum repositories over HTTP or HTTPS, it is also possible to export repositories to ISO images, which are published over HTTP or HTTPS, or to a directory on the Pulp server. Large repositories may be split into several ISOs.

Proxy Settings

When retrieving packages from a remote repository, Pulp can use a proxy and can supply basic authentication credentials to that proxy.

Bandwidth Throttling

When downloading packages from a remote source, Pulp can limit the speed at which data is transferred. The number of downloader threads can also be specified.