Heat/LocalPackageCacheMirror

For frequently repeated stack creation, or scenarios where your internet connection is either slow or bandwidth limited, it can be desirable to locally cache package repository data and packages, such that the instance creation (which typically includes installing additional packages from the remote repositories) is quicker.

The heat developers have been using the following approaches to speed up stack launches:

Squid Cache

Steve Baker's blog post about setting up a local squid proxy:

A similar approach can be used to install a squid proxy on a local development machine (asalkeld had notes on setting this up on Fedora in the old GitHub wiki, perhaps he still has notes which can be pasted in here?)

Local Repository Mirror

An alternative approach is to locally mirror the entire repository and updates - this is useful if you have multiple machines running the same OS and you want to do network installs etc, basically you need a local server box running an http server, and a script which runs periodically (e.g nightly via a cron job) to sync with a local mirror which supports rsync. You can then build a JEOS image (or modify an existing one) to point yum at the local mirror.

See Fedora Notes on setting up public/private mirrors

shardy TODO create github gist with my rsync scripts, yum repos.d files and heat-jeos TDL