Create and Distribute Checkpoints¶

Warning

This feature requires plugin support to work correctly.

Warning

This feature is provided as a tech preview and could change in backwards incompatible ways in the future.

Overview¶

Checkpoints in Pulp provide a way to access and manage historical versions of repositories. This feature allows users to view and install packages as they existed at specific points in time. By using checkpoints, you can recreate environments from any given date/time, which is particularly useful for tracking down when changes or regressions were introduced.

Checkpoints support reproducible deployments, help identify changes in package behavior over time, and facilitate a structured update workflow. This ensures that a validated environment can be consistently replicated across different stages of development and production.

For a similar concept, you can refer to Debian's snapshot archive, which offers access to old snapshots of the repositories based on timestamps.

Enabling Checkpoints¶

Checkpoint is a plugin-dependent feature. It needs to be enabled in a plugin before you can start using it.

Creating Checkpoints¶

The first step to start using checkpoint, is to create a checkpoint distribution which will be used to distribute checkpoint publications. A checkpoint distribution serves all the checkpoint publications of the related repository.

pulp file distribution create \
    --name <distro_name> \
    --repository <repo_name> \
    --base-path <distro_base_path> \
    --checkpoint

The next step is to create checkpoint publications. Only publications marked as checkpoint will be served from the checkpoint distribution. When creating checkpoint publications, you can only pass the repository, not any of its versions. The repository's latest version will be used to create the publication. Repository versions of the distributed checkpoint publications will be protected from the automatic cleanup defined by retain_repo_versions.

pulp file publication create \
    --repository <repo_name> \
    --checkpoint

Accessing Checkpoints¶

Listing All Checkpoints¶

You can access a listing of all the available repository's checkpoint publications by accessing the base path of any of the repository's checkpoint distributions.

http https://pulp.example/pulp/content/checkpoint/myfile

<html>
<head><title>Index of checkpoint/myfile/</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<h1>Index of checkpoint/myfile/</h1>
<hr><pre><a href="../">../</a>
<a href="20250130T203000Z/">20250130T203000Z/</a>                                  30-Jan-2025 20:30
<a href="20250130T205000Z/">20250130T205000Z/</a>                                  30-Jan-2025 20:50
</pre><hr></body>
</html>

Accessing a Specific Checkpoint¶

To access a specific checkpoint, suffix the checkpoint distribution's path with a timestamp in the format yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ (e.g. 20250130T205339Z), If a checkpoint was created at this time, it will be served. Otherwise, you will be redirected to the latest checkpoint created before this timestamp. Trying to access a checkpoint using a timestamp in the future or before the first checkpoint's timestamp, will result in a 404 response.

Assuming the checkpoints from the above example, the below table show responses for sample requests

Request path	Response
checkpoint/myfile/20250130T203000Z/	200
checkpoint/myfile/20250130T204000Z/	301 Location: checkpoint/myfile/20250130T203000Z/
checkpoint/myfile/20250130T206000Z/	301 Location: checkpoint/myfile/20250130T205000Z/
checkpoint/myfile/20250130T202000Z/	404
checkpoint/myfile/29250130T203000Z/	404