Caching RPM repositories with Nginx

22 Dec 2025

I’ve been work in a project that requires installation of a huge amount of packages during testing. I usually setup the upstream repostiories, the problem with this is that it keep downloading the same package again and again and a lot of time and network bandwith could be saved if the packages were cached locally.

Today I decided to spend some minutes looking into how to do it with nginx. And it is pretty simple.

Here is the snippet that you would need.

proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx/yum
    levels=1:2
    keys_zone=yumcache:100m
    max_size=20g
    inactive=30d
    use_temp_path=off;

server {
    listen 8080;
    listen [::]:8080;
    location /cache/ {
	proxy_pass https://example.com/;
	proxy_cache yumcache;
	proxy_cache_valid 200 301 302 30d;
	proxy_cache_lock on;
	proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout updating http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;
	proxy_set_header Host example.com;
	proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires;
	add_header X-Cache $upstream_cache_status;
    }
}

To test use

curl -Is localhost:8080/cache/<some_path_in_the_upstream> 2>&1 | grep X-Cache

You’ll see

X-Cache: MISS

or

X-Cache: HIT

And that’s it!