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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.

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