The reasons to create a YUM repository are many. You can imagine a situation where you have more than one server on your network. It would make sense that the software is retrieved locally, rather than having all servers cross the WAN to access packages. The same reasoning scales to where CentOS desktops are common place. Centralizing software distribution is an absolute requirement, standardizing software being used and to ensure that your support team only has to support the single version of a package.

Building a local repository in a virtual machine that is just used for testing and development also makes great sense, removing the need to be connected to the network to install software packages. I ensure my classroom virtual machines always have a local file-based repository so that the system can be used as a discrete identity without relying on networking or external components.

For this little foray, we shall create a local repository using the RPMs from the...