mkelfs - create Kickstart Trees for EL-like distros comfortably

Hi everyone,

I just created a Python tool for creating Kickstart Trees for EL-like distros (e.g. CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux) comfortably.

After specifying a particular release (e.g. 6.5) and architecture (e.g. x86_64) the tool creates needed folder structures automatically and downloads the needed files for kickstarting.

By default the script downloads files from the Kernel.org mirror for CentOS.

Some examples:

$ mkelfs.py --release 6.5 --arch x86_64

downloads the latest kickstart files for CentOS 6.5 x86_64 to /var/satellite/kickstart_tree.
Mirror http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos is used.

$ mkelfs.py --release 4.1 --arch i386 --target /var/museum/ks --mirror http://vault.centos.org

downloads the antiquated CentOS release 4.1 for i386 from the CentOS Vault mirror site.
Files are stored in /var/museum/ks

$ mkelfs.py -r 6.4 -a x86_64 -m http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/Linux/INSTALL/scientific -o scientific -fq

downloads the Scientific Linux release 6.4 x86_64 from a Finnish mirror. Pre-existing files are overwritten and no additional output is generated.

$ mkelfs.py -f -r 20 -a i386 -m http://mirror.digitalnova.at/fedora/linux -o fedora

downloads the 32-bit kickstart files for Fedora release 20 from a Austrian mirror.

Just wanted to share that with you - maybe someone finds it useful. :)

You can download the script for free at Github

By the way: that's my first python script - so feel free to give me some feedback to optimize it. :)

Best regards,
Christian.