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Caching and Upstream Proxying for RedHat Packages

Oct 14 2020/Software Package Formats/2 min read
Caching and Upstream Proxying for RedHat Packages
Picture of Dan McKinney
by Dan McKinney
Cloudsmith offers configurable upstream proxying and caching support for RedHat packages.

In keeping with our vision of offering a universal feature set across all the package formats we support, we are delighted to announce that we are now offering configurable upstream proxying and caching support for RedHat packages.

As we touched upon when announcing the same for Debian and Maven packages, there are a lot of reasons why this is a really good thing, so instead of going over those again, let’s jump straight into how you can set this up in you Cloudsmith repository.

Getting Started.

We don’t think that we could have made this much easier to configure (but, of course, we would love to hear your thoughts on this!)

In your Cloudsmith repository, you’ll see a menu item called “Upstream Proxying”. This is where we will configure our upstreams. Simply click the “Create Upstreams” button and select “RedHat” to create a new RedHat upstream:

You will then see the “Create RedHat Upstream” form:

You just need to add a Name for the upstream, the upstream URL, and a priority weighting – If you have multiple upstreams this will determine the order in which they are used.

We can choose to fetch and cache any requested package (instead of just fetching them), and to verify the SSL certificates provided by the upstream. Then, we select the individual distribution for this upstream.

Optionally - we can also add a GPG key, if required, for package signing, authentication headers for private repositories that require authentication and also some arbitrary headers if you wish to send something custom along with your request.

And that’s it, we have now added a new Redhat upstream to our Cloudsmith repository.

So now, the next request for a package that isn’t present in this repository will be passed through to the upstream and the package fetched it if it is available there.  If you also enabled “fetch and cache”, the package will be cached in your Cloudsmith repo for any future requests.

Summary

By adding Redhat upstream proxying and caching, we are moving forwards towards our goal of being the most universal package management solution for your development, deployment and distribution workflows. We would love you to join us on this journey, and we are very excited about the platform we have built, the service that we provide, and where we are going to next. Sign up for free today, and experience Cloudsmith for yourself!

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