There are a few good articles out there describing how to set up duplicity to backup to Amazon S3. If you are on CentOS however, chances are you have an older version of duplicity (0.6.09 on CentOS 5.5), and unfortunately this version of duplicity and a dependency library called python-boto, have problems using S3 as a backend. (there is a patch for one half of the problem, but there is also a problem with the underlying boto library) Newer versions that fix this (duplicity 0.6.11 and python-boto 1.9b-6) are in the epel-testing repo.

If you are using Puppet, an easy way to grab only these packages from epel-testing, without enabling all packages, is to specify a ‘yum-repo’ resource with an ‘includepkgs’ parameter, like:

class yum-repo {
  yumrepo {
    'epel-testing':
       enabled => '1',
       includepkgs => "duplicity python-boto"; # only include duplicity
  }
}

This will ensure you only get the duplicity and python-boto updates, and don’t slam your entire server with test packages.

It would be more convenient to be able to enable a repository for a specific Puppet package definition (just like you can use –enablerepo on the yum command line), however it’s not possible at the moment. There is a feature request for this.