Gentoo local overlay

September 18, 2018 — Jesse Harris

I find myself having to create a local overlay to test/develop a new ebuild without affecting my main system from time to time. I usually fire up a clean kvm Gentoo guest to start working on, but I've usually forgotten the proceedure

This is a quick instruction on a straight-forward local overlay

Create the local path tree where the overlay will reside:

mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/overlay/{metadata,profiles}

Create the layout.conf file and repo_name file

cd /usr/local/portage/overlay
echo "masters = gentoo" > metadata/layout.conf
echo  "$(hostname)" > profiles/repo_name

Create a repos.conf file:

cat <<EOF>/etc/portage/repos.conf/$(hostname).conf
[$(hostname)]
location = /usr/local/portage/overlay
auto-sync = no
priority = 10
EOF

done.

Now you can begin to populate the local repo with custom ebuilds. I usually do this and then upload my new ebuild to my github repository.

zigford.org

Gentoo local overlay

done.