05 Mar 2021

Sometimes, you only want to download RPM packages without installing them. This is now super easy with DNF.

If you remember Yum, you had to resolve to installing a yum-plugin-downloadonly plugin or a separate tool to be able to download them for inspection.

With DNF on the latest Fedora and CentOS 8, you can just run dnf download:

$ sudo dnf download ruby
(1/2): ruby-2.7.2-135.fc32.i686.rpm             133 kB/s |  41 kB     00:00
(2/2): ruby-2.7.2-135.fc32.x86_64.rpm           133 kB/s |  40 kB     00:00

As you can see, I am not specifying the architecture, so I got both. They were downloaded to the current working directory, which is also convenient.

There is also dnf download --resolve which pulls dependent packages as well:

$ sudo dnf download --resolve ruby
(1/6): gdbm-libs-1.18.1-3.fc32.i686.rpm         171 kB/s |  57 kB     00:00
(2/6): ruby-2.7.2-135.fc32.x86_64.rpm            73 kB/s |  40 kB     00:00
(3/6): ruby-2.7.2-135.fc32.i686.rpm              72 kB/s |  41 kB     00:00
(4/6): readline-8.0-4.fc32.i686.rpm             449 kB/s | 210 kB     00:00
(5/6): ruby-libs-2.7.2-135.fc32.x86_64.rpm      300 kB/s | 3.2 MB     00:10
(6/6): ruby-libs-2.7.2-135.fc32.i686.rpm        267 kB/s | 3.3 MB     00:12

fedora centos linux

Any comments? Write me a direct message at @strzibnyj.