Installing RHEL packages without network connection

If you haven’t found yourself in this situation while working as a Linux sysadmin, you will — one day or the other.

You need to install a package (let’s call it Foobar) on a RHEL server which, for some reason, has no connection to the network. The package requires a complex list of dependencies, so it’s not simply a matter of grabbing the RPM and uploading it on the server. How do you proceed?

1. Set up a stub machine

First, create a Virtual Machine and do a fresh install of the same RHEL version on it. Make sure you perform a minimal installation so that the packages installed on the machine are kept to the minimum required for the machine to run.

Then run the following commands on the machine:

Yum will download Foobar and all its dependencies recursively, storing the RPMs in the directory mentioned above.

2. Create a local repository

The second step is to create a repository from the bunch of packages downloaded by Yum.

3. Set up the local repository on the server

Transfer the tmppkg directory on the server (via USB thumb drive or CD-ROM) and put it in the /share directory. Then create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/local.repo as such:

[local]
name=Local repository
baseurl=file:///share/tmppkg
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
protect=1

Now you can install the Foobar package on the server in the usual way. The package manager will fetch all the necessary content from the newly created local repository:

Once you’ve installed the package, the /share/tmppkg directory can be safely deleted.

You might ask yourself why you couldn’t simply make a copy of the whole repo from RHN and transfer it to the server, hence skipping steps #1 and #2 altogether. The answer is that the whole repository makes several Gb in size, and therefore this solution would require a long transfer time and a large amount of free disk space on the server.