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Publishing to a local directory

S3 is not mandatory. The localfs provider writes the same signed repository tree to a directory on the host instead of uploading it to a bucket. The output is a standard DEB/RPM/pacman repository, identical to what an S3 target produces.

Use it to:

  • inspect exactly what publish generates,
  • install on the same machine without any server,
  • self-host behind a web server or shared mount you already run.

Configuration

- name: Local
  provider: localfs
  gpg_private_key_base64: "${GPG_KEY}"
  package_name: "sample-project"
  localfs:
    path: "${HOME}/sample-project-repo"

path is the only localfs key. Environment placeholders such as ${HOME} are expanded from the env file. The directory is created if it does not exist.

What gets written

Each distro lands in its own subdirectory named by distro id, with the package, the signed native repo metadata, and the public key. The generated install page sits at the root:

sample-project-repo/
├── install.html
├── fedora_42/
│   ├── sample-project.repo
│   ├── repodata/
│   └── sample-project-1.0-1.x86_64.rpm
├── debian_12/
│   └── stable/
│       ├── Release
│       ├── Release.key
│       ├── Packages.gz
│       └── sample-project_1.0_amd64.deb
└── arch/
    ├── public.key
    ├── sample-project.db.tar.gz
    └── sample-project-1.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Inspect and install locally

Open install.html in a browser for the per-distro install snippets. Because localfs has no public URL, the snippets point at path on disk, so they work as-is for installing on the same machine.

Self-hosting

The directory is a complete, standard repository. To serve it over the network, point any static web server (nginx, Caddy, python -m http.server) at path, or place it on an NFS/SMB share. Package managers consume it like any other repo.

The generated install.html links use the on-disk path, not your server's URL, so for a networked repo give consumers the repository URL directly. If you want a turnkey public repo with a matching install page, an S3-compatible backend is simpler — including self-hosted MinIO, which speaks the same S3 API. See Publishing to S3.

Retention

retain_packages works the same as for S3: each publish/release keeps the N most recent packages per distro plus the new build and prunes the rest from path.