4.3.2. Setting [repository] Options

The [repository] sections, where repository is a unique repository ID such as my_personal_repo (spaces are not permitted), allow you to define individual Yum repositories.

The following is a bare-minimum example of the form a [repository] section takes:

[repository]
name=repository_name
baseurl=repository_url

Every [repository] section must contain the following directives:

name=repository_name

…where repository_name is a human-readable string describing the repository.

baseurl=repository_url

…where repository_url is a URL to the directory where the repodata directory of a repository is located:

If the repository is available over HTTP, use: http://path/to/repo
If the repository is available over FTP, use: ftp://path/to/repo
If the repository is local to the machine, use: file:///path/to/local/repo
If a specific online repository requires basic HTTP authentication, you can specify your username and password by prepending it to the URL as username:password@link. For example, if a repository on http://www.example.com/repo/ requires a username of “user” and a password of “password”, then the baseurl link could be specified as http://user:password@www.example.com/repo/.

Usually this URL is an HTTP link, such as:

baseurl=http://path/to/repo/releases/$releasever/server/$basearch/os/

Note that Yum always expands the $releasever, $arch, and $basearch variables in URLs. For more information about Yum variables, refer to Section 4.3.3, “Using Yum Variables”.

Another useful [repository] directive is the following:

enabled=value: …where value is one of:
0 — Do not include this repository as a package source when performing updates and installs. This is an easy way of quickly turning repositories on and off, which is useful when you desire a single package from a repository that you do not want to enable for updates or installs.
1 — Include this repository as a package source.
Turning repositories on and off can also be performed by passing either the --enablerepo=repo_name or --disablerepo=repo_name option to yum, or through the Add/Remove Software window of the PackageKit utility.

Many more [repository] options exist. For a complete list, refer to the [repository] OPTIONS section of the yum.conf(5) manual page.