Yum: Package Management in Red Hat

Introduction

Yum, which stands for Yellow dog Updater Modified, is a package manager for Linux distributions like Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, created by Yellow Dog Linux.

It allows you to manage the installation and updating of software installed on a distribution. It's a layer on top of RPM that handles downloads and dependencies, similar to Debian's APT or Mandriva's Urpmi.

Usage

• Installing a package:

1

yum install <package>

• Reinstalling a package:

1

yum reinstall <package>

• Installing a local RPM:

1

yum localinstall <package.rpm>

• Removing a package:

1

yum remove <package>

• Updating packages or a specific package:

1

yum update <package>

• Getting information about a package:

1

yum info <package>

• Installing a package group:

1

yum groupinstall <group>

• Viewing available packages (installed or not):

1

yum list

or

1

yum list htt*

• Viewing available package groups:

1

yum grouplist

• Viewing repositories:

1

yum repolist

• Finding which package a file belongs to (equivalent of apt-file):

1

yum provides <file/command>

or

1

yum whatprovides <file/command>

• Ignoring missing GPG key:

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yum ... --nogpg

• Listing all installed packages:

1

yum list installed

• Forcing the protection of an rpm on a specific redhat version:

1

yum protectbase <package>

• Checking compatibility:

1

yum verify <package>

• Downloading packages only

You will need the yum-downloadonly package first to have this option in yum:

1

yum install yum-downloadonly

Then to download the package:

1

yum install -y postfix --downloadonly

• Viewing the contents of a package:

1

rpm -qla <package>

or

1

repoquery -qla <package>