Orphaned Content Units

Introduction

Repositories are the container into which content is drawn into Pulp and by which Pulp serves content. However, under the hood, Pulp actually manages content separately from repositories. This allows Pulp to minimize disk space by never duplicating content that is shared between repositories (i.e. content units that appear in more than one repository).

The consequence of this approach is that when a repository is deleted from the Pulp server, the content associated with that repository is not. Content units that are no longer associated with any repositories are referred to as orphaned content units or simply orphans.

This page describes the management of orphaned content units.

Listing Orphaned Content Units

The pulp-admin command line client provides the orphan section and the list command to inspect the orphaned content units on your server:

$ pulp-admin orphan list --type=rpm --details
Arch:          noarch
Checksum:      7e9cad8b2cd436079fd524803ec7fa209a666ecdda05c6f9c8c5ee70cdea9ce6
Checksumtype:  sha256
Epoch:         0
Id:            a0079ca2-1d4f-4d01-8307-3f183f1843a6
Name:          tito
Release:       1.fc16
Version:       0.4.9

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
                                Summary
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

RPM:    1
Total:  1

You can filter the list by content type by using the --type=<type> flag.

You can use the --details flag to list the individual orphaned content units. Otherwise only the Summary section is displayed. This flag is not available when the content type is omitted, and will be ignored if specified.

Removing Orphaned Content Units

The pulp-admin command line client provides the orphan section and remove command to remove orphaned content units from your server.

It has three flags:

  • --type=<type> to remove all the orphaned content units of a particular type
  • --id=<id> to remove a particular orphaned content unit
  • --all to remove all the orphaned content units on the server
$ pulp-admin orphan remove --all
Request accepted

check status of task e239ae4f-7fad-4004-bfb6-8e06f17d22ef with "pulp-admin tasks details"

$ pulp-admin tasks details --task-id e239ae4f-7fad-4004-bfb6-8e06f17d22ef
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
                              Task Details
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

Operations:
Resources:    orphans (content_unit)
State:        Successful
Start Time:   2012-12-09T03:26:51Z
Finish Time:  2012-12-09T03:26:51Z
Result:       N/A
Task Id:      e239ae4f-7fad-4004-bfb6-8e06f17d22ef
Progress:

$ pulp-admin orphan list
$