Downloading RHEL 7 ISOs for free

A year and a half ago, frighteningly close to 1st April, Red Hat announced the availability of a gratis, self-supported, developer-only subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a series of other products. Simply put, if you went to developers.redhat.com, created an account and clicked a few buttons, you could download a RHEL ISO without paying anything to anybody. For the past few months, I have been investigating whether we can leverage this to do something exciting in Fedora Workstation. Particularly for those who might be building applications on Fedora that would eventually be deployed on RHEL.

While trying to figure out how the developers.redhat.com website and its associated infrastructure works, I discovered that its source code is actually available on GitHub. Sadly, my ineptitude with server-side applications and things like JBoss, Ruby, etc. meant that it wasn’t enough for me to write code that could interface with it. Luckily, the developers were kind enough to answer my questions, and now I know enough to write a C program that can download a free RHEL ISO.

The code is here: download-rhel.c.

I’ll leave it here in the hope that some unknown Internet traveller might find it useful. As for Fedora Workstation, I’ll let you know if we manage to come up with something concrete. 😉