Fedora YUM

Note

The standalone yum project is archived; on modern RHEL and Fedora the yum command is a maintained compatibility alias for dnf.

ID

yum

Home page

http://yum.baseurl.org

Version requirement

>= 4

Platforms

🅱️ BSD · 🐧 Linux · ⨂ Unix

Operations

installed · outdated · orphans · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · sync · cleanup · doctor

purl types

pkg:rpm · pkg:yum

CLI name

yum

Every call

yum --color=never --quiet <command>

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: rpm-based

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/dnf.py

YUM, the package manager DNF superseded.

On current Fedora and RHEL the yum binary is a wrapper around dnf. mpm drives it exactly as DNF, only the binary name differs.

What mpm adds to yum

Through mpm, yum gains --exact and --extended search, to narrow to exact names or match descriptions.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover yum alongside dnf, dnf5, zypper and any other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your yum commands, in mpm

You already know yum: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…

With yum

With mpm

List what’s installed

dnf repoquery --userinstalled --qf FORMAT

mpm --yum installed

List outdated packages

dnf repoquery --upgrades --qf FORMAT

mpm --yum outdated

Search for a package

dnf search usd

mpm --yum search usd

Install a package

sudo dnf --assumeyes install pip

mpm install pkg:yum/pip

Upgrade one package

sudo dnf --assumeyes upgrade pip

mpm --yum upgrade pip

Upgrade everything

sudo dnf --assumeyes upgrade

mpm --yum upgrade --all

Remove a package

sudo dnf --assumeyes remove pip

mpm remove pkg:yum/pip

List orphaned dependencies

dnf repoquery --unneeded

mpm --yum orphans

Clear caches

sudo dnf clean all

mpm --yum cleanup --cache

Run health checks

dnf check

mpm --yum doctor

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

orphans

✓

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

--orphans also drops the package’s orphaned dependencies

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

--orphans runs the system-wide orphan sweep

doctor

✓

Selecting and configuring yum

Deselect yum for a single run with --no-yum, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
yum = false

The arguments and environment variables listed in the box atop this page are forced on every yum call, so runs stay quiet, non-interactive and reproducible: the defaults you would set in CI anyway.

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.yum]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template yum prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes

A few jobs you would otherwise script around yum, one mpm command each:

  • Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --yum dump yum.toml, then mpm restore yum.toml on the next one.

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --yum sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

  • Gate CI on health: mpm --yum doctor relays Fedora YUM’s own diagnosis and exits non-zero on trouble.

Privilege escalation

System-wide manager: mpm wraps its privileged operations in sudo out of the box. Instead of letting the tool prompt mid-run, mpm primes the credential cache up-front, with a single branded password prompt at most. Turn escalation off for rootless setups with --no-sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Fedora YUM’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ➖ N/A (deprecated alias for dnf on RHEL-family)

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

  • Registry: Distro binary archives (pkg:deb, pkg:rpm, pkg:alpm, pkg:apk)

  • Retraction: Index revert: removal is an archive operation and the mirror is rebuilt without the package. Debian, for one, requires filing an RM: bug against ftp.debian.org (developers-reference)

  • Publish date: ❌ the version string is the distro maintainer’s build, carrying no upstream publication date

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe

The version is extracted from the output of yum --version with:

r"(?P<version>\S+)"

Changelog

  • 7.4.0 (2026-07-25)

    • Plain cleanup no longer removes orphaned packages: their native sweeps moved behind cleanup --orphans. This also stops emerge’s cleanup from triggering its pre-depclean world upgrade unless --orphans is given.

    • remove no longer cascades to orphaned dependencies by default: a plain removal keeps them. Use the new remove --orphans to restore the previous behavior.

  • 6.2.0 (2026-03-25)

    • Add --quiet option to all invocations to reduce log verbosity.

  • 5.19.0 (2024-11-14)

    • Implement remove operation.

    • Use query template instead of regex parsing to retrieve package data.

  • 5.0.0 (2022-04-25)

    • Add dedicated yum package manager. Refs #415.

  • 4.12.0 (2022-04-04)

    • Allow yum to act as dnf. Closes #415.