Creating a chroot for CentOS 7.3

Creating a chroot for CentOS 7.3

I have recently written some RPM spec files (and to be honest it feels nicer than creating debian packages) and could test installing the resulting packages on a cloud based CentOS 6.8 VM. After that worked I wanted to test the package on a CentOS 7 system as well. To my surprise my cloud platform didn’t have CentOS 7 images. There was RHEL7 with extra computing costs and several CentOS images with extra packages (or “hardening”) that also incurred extra cost.

Being a Debian user for many many years I thought of using something like debootstrap. I initially remembered something called yumbootstrap but the packages/Google hits I found didn’t provide much. I mostly followed another guide and will write down some differences.

$ mkdir -p chroot/var/lib/rpm
$ rpm –rebuilddb –root=$PWD/chroot
$ rpm -i –root=$PWD/chroot –nodeps centos-release-7-3.1611.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
$ wget -O /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7 http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Testing-7

# Create base7 repo
$ echo ”
[base7]
name=CentOS7
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7″ > /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOs7.repo

$ yum –disablerepo=\* –enablerepo=base7  –installroot=$PWD/chroot –noplugins install -y rpm-build yum

At that point one can chroot into the new directory. These were enough. I am running this on a CentOS6.8 system so some binaries might fail with the older kernel but I didn’t run into such an issue yet.