repopulator 1.0

A portable library to generate binary software repositories

repolulator

A portable Python library to generate binary software repositories

Purpose

Ever needed to build an APT package repository on Fedora? Or perhaps a DNF repository on Debian? How about FreeBSD repository on Windows or Mac? This library allows you to do all these things and more. And yes, you can do it even on Windows if you are so inclined for some reason.

All binary package repositories have their own tools that usually range from being "non-portable" to "portable with lots of effort to limited platforms only". On the other hand it is often convenient to build software packages in a Map/Reduce fashion where a single host collects multiple packages built for different platforms to produce binary repositories. Such host will necessarily need to be able to build repositories for "foreign" packages. This library is an attempt to enable such scenario.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.8
• If you plan to build repositories that require GPG signing gpg command needs to be available in PATH
• If you plan to build repositories that require private key signing OpenSSL > 3.0 libraries need to be available on your platform

Supported repository formats

• APT
• RPM
• Pacman
• Alpine apk
• FreeBSD pkg

Installing

pip install repopulator

Documentation

Reference for public API is available at https://gershnik.github.io/repopulator/

Sample Usage

The basic outline of the usage is the same for all repository types:

• Create the repository object
• Add packages to it. These must be files somewhere on your filesystem which is not their final destination
• Some repositories like APT have additional subdivisions (distributions for APT). If so you need to create them and assign packages added to repository to them
• Export the repository to the destination folder. This overwrites any repository already there (but not any extra files you might have).

That's all there is to it. Note that there is no ability to "load" existing repositories and change them. This is deliberate. If you want to do incremental repository maintenance it is far easier to keep necessary info yourself in your own format than to parse it out of various repositories.

Currently repositories are required to be signed and you need to provide signing info for export (see examples below). This requirement might be relaxed in future versions.

APT

from repopulator import AptRepo, PgpSigner

repo = AptRepo()

package1 = repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome_3.14_amd64.deb')
package2 = repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome_3.14_arm64.deb')

dist = repo.add_distribution('jammy', 
                             origin='my packages', 
                             label='my apt repo', 
                             suite='jammy', 
                             version='1.2', 
                             description='my awesome repo')

repo.assign_package(package1, dist, component='main')
repo.assign_package(package2, dist, component='main')

signer = PgpSigner('name_of_key_to_use', 'password_of_that_key')

repo.export('/path/of/new/repo', signer)

RPM

from repopulator import RpmRepo, PgpSigner

repo = RpmRepo()
repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome-3.14-1.el9.x86_64.rpm')
repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome-3.14-1.el9.aarch64.rpm')

signer = PgpSigner('name_of_key_to_use', 'password_of_that_key')

repo.export('/path/of/new/repo', signer)

Pacman

from repopulator import PacmanRepo, PgpSigner

repo = PacmanRepo('myrepo')
# if .sig file is present next to the .zst file it will be used for signature
# otherwise new signature will be generated at export time
repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome-3.14-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst')
repo.add_package('/path/to/another-1.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst')

signer = PgpSigner('name_of_key_to_use', 'password_of_that_key')

repo.export('/path/of/new/repo', signer)

Alpine apk

from repopulator import AlpineRepo, PkiSigner

repo = AlpineRepo('my repo description')
repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome-3.14-r0.apk')
repo.add_package('/path/to/another-1.23-r0.apk')

signer = PkiSigner('/path/to/private/key', 'password_or_None')

# Unlike `pkg` tool we do not parse signer name out of private key filename
# so you can name your key files whatever you wish
repo.export('/path/of/new/repo', signer, signer_name = '[e-mail]-1234abcd')

FreeBSD pkg

from repopulator import FreeBSDRepo, PkiSigner

repo = FreeBSDRepo()
repo.add_package('/path/to/awesome-3.14.pkg')
repo.add_package('/path/to/another-1.2.pkg')

signer = PkiSigner('/path/to/private/key', 'password_or_None')

repo.export('/path/of/new/repo', signer)