http://linux.die.net/man/5/yum.conf

yum.conf(5) – Linux man page

Name

yum.conf – Configuration file for yum(8).

Description

Yum uses a configuration file at /etc/yum.conf.

Additional configuration files are also read from the directories set by the reposdir option (default is ‘/etc/yum.repos.d’ and ‘/etc/yum/repos.d’). See the reposdir option below for further details.

Parameters

There are two types of sections in the yum configuration file(s): main and repository. Main defines all global configuration options. There should be only one main section. The repository section(s) define the configuration for each repository/server. There should be one or more repository sections.

[main] OPTIONS

The [main] section must exist for yum to do anything. It consists of the following options:

cachedir

Directory where yum should store its cache and db files. The default is ‘/var/cache/yum’.

keepcache

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. Determines whether or not yum keeps the cache of headers and packages after succesful installation. Default is ‘1’ (keep files)

reposdir

A list of directories where yum should look for .repo files which define repositories to use. Default is ‘/etc/yum.repos.d, /etc/yum/repos.d’. Each file in this directory should contain one or more repository sections as documented in [repository] options below. These will be merged with the repositories defined in /etc/yum.conf to form the complete set of repositories that yum will use.

debuglevel

Debug message output level. Practical range is 0-10. Default is ‘2’.

errorlevel

Error message output level. Practical range is 0-10. Default is ‘2’.

logfile

Full directory and file name for where yum should write its log file.

gpgcheck

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. This tells yum whether or not it should perform a GPG signature check on packages. When this is set in the [main] section it sets the default for all repositories. This option also determines whether or not an install of a package from a local RPM file will be GPG signature checked. The default is ‘0’.

assumeyes

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. Determines whether or not yum prompts for confirmation of critical actions. Default is ‘0’ (do prompt).
Commmand-line option: -y

alwaysprompt

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. Without this option, yum will not prompt for confirmation when the list of packages to be installed exactly matches those given on the command line. Unless assumeyes is enabled, it will still prompt for package removal, or when additional packages need to be installed to fulfill dependencies. Default is ‘1’.

tolerant

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. If enabled, then yum will be tolerant of errors on the command line with regard to packages. For example: if you request to install foo, bar and baz and baz is installed; yum won’t error out complaining that baz is already installed. Default to ‘0’ (not tolerant).
Commmand-line option: -t

exclude

List of packages to exclude from updates or installs. This should be a space separated list. Shell globs using wildcards (eg. * and ?) are allowed.

exactarch

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. Set to ‘1’ to make yum update only update the architectures of packages that you have installed. ie: with this enabled yum will not install an i686 package to update an i386 package. Default is ‘1’.

installonlypkgs

List of packages that should only ever be installed, never updated. Kernels in particular fall into this category. Defaults to ‘kernel, kernel-smp, kernel-bigmem, kernel-enterprise, kernel-debug, kernel-unsupported’.

kernelpkgnames

List of package names that are kernels. This is really only here for the updating of kernel packages and should be removed out in the yum 2.1 series.

showdupesfromrepos

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Set to ‘1’ if you wish to show any duplicate packages from any repository. Set to ‘0’ if you want only to see the newest packages from any repository. Default is ‘0’.

obsoletes

This option only has affect during an update. It enables yum’s obsoletes processing logic. Useful when doing distribution level upgrades. See also the yum upgrade command documentation for more details (yum(8)).
Commmand-line option: –obsoletes

overwrite_groups

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Used to determine yum’s behaviour if two or more repositories offer the package groups with the same name. If overwrite_groups is ‘1’ then the group packages of the last matching repository will be used. If overwrite_groups is ‘0’ then the groups from all matching repositories will be merged together as one large group.

enable_group_conditionals

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Determines whether yum will allow the use of conditionals packages. Default is ‘1’ (package conditionals are allowed).

group_package_types

List of the following: optional, default, mandatory. Tells yum which type of packages in groups will be installed when ‘groupinstall’ is called. Default is: default, mandatory

installroot

Specifies an alternative installroot, relative to which all packages will be installed.
Commmand-line option: –installroot

distroverpkg

The package used by yum to determine the “version” of the distribution. This can be any installed package. Default is ‘redhat-release’.

diskspacecheck

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Set this to ‘0’ to disable the checking for sufficient diskspace before a RPM transaction is run. Default is ‘1’ (perform the check).

tsflags

Comma or space separated list of transaction flags to pass to the rpm transaction set. These include ‘noscripts’, ‘notriggers’, ‘nodocs’, ‘test’, and ‘repackage’. You can set all/any of them. However, if you don’t know what these do in the context of an rpm transaction set you’re best leaving it alone. Default is an empty list.

recentNumber of days back to look for ‘recent’ packages added to a repository. Used by the list recent command. Default is ‘7’.

retries

Set the number of times any attempt to retrieve a file should retry before returning an error. Setting this to ‘0’ makes yum try forever. Default is ‘6’.

keepalive

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Set whether HTTP keepalive should be used for HTTP/1.1 servers that support it. This can improve transfer speeds by using one connection when downloading multiple files from a repository. Default is ‘1’.

timeout

Number of seconds to wait for a connection before timing out. Defaults to 30 seconds. This may be too short of a time for extremely overloaded sites.

http_caching

Determines how upstream HTTP caches are instructed to handle any HTTP downloads that Yum does. This option can take the following values:’all’ means that all HTTP downloads should be cached.

‘packages’ means that only RPM package downloads should be cached (but not repository metadata downloads).

‘none’ means that no HTTP downloads should be cached.

The default is ‘all’. This is recommended unless you are experiencing caching related issues. Try to at least use ‘packages’ to minimise load on repository servers.

throttle

Enable bandwidth throttling for downloads. This option can be expressed as a absolute data rate in bytes/sec. An SI prefix (k, M or G) may be appended to the bandwidth value (eg. ‘5.5k’ is 5.5 kilobytes/sec, ‘2M’ is 2 Megabytes/sec).Alternatively, this option can specify the percentage of total bandwidth to use (eg. ‘60%’). In this case the bandwidth option should be used to specify the maximum available bandwidth.

Set to ‘0’ to disable bandwidth throttling. This is the default.

bandwidth

Use to specify the maximum available network bandwidth in bytes/second. Used with the throttle option (above). If throttle is a percentage and bandwidth is ‘0’ then bandwidth throttling will be disabled. If throttle is expressed as a data rate (bytes/sec) then this option is ignored. Default is ‘0’ (no bandwidth throttling).

commands

List of functional commands to run if no functional commands are specified on the command line (eg. “update foo bar baz quux”). None of the short options (eg. -y, -e, -d) are accepted for this option.

proxyurl to the proxy server that yum should use.

proxy_username

username to use for proxy

proxy_password

password for this proxy

plugins

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Global switch to enable or disable yum plugins. Default is ‘0’ (plugins disabled). See the PLUGINS section of the yum(8) man for more information on installing yum plugins.

pluginpath

A list of directories where yum should look for plugin modules. Default is ‘/usr/lib/yum-plugins’.

pluginconfpath

A list of directories where yum should look for plugin configuration files. Default is ‘/etc/yum/pluginconf.d’.

metadata_expire

Time (in seconds) after which the metadata will expire. So that if the current metadata downloaded is less than this many seconds old then yum will not update the metadata against the repository. If you find that yum is not downloading information on updates as often as you would like lower the value of this option.

[repository] OPTIONS

The repository section(s) take the following form:

Example:

[repositoryid]
name=Some name for this repository
baseurl=url://path/to/repository/

repositoryid

Must be a unique name for each repository, one word.

nameA human readable string describing the repository.

baseurl

Must be a URL to the directory where the yum repository’s ‘repodata’ directory lives. Can be an http://, ftp:// or file:// URL. You can specify multiple URLs in one baseurl statement. The best way to do this is like this:
[repositoryid]
name=Some name for this repository
baseurl=url://server1/path/to/repository/
url://server2/path/to/repository/
url://server3/path/to/repository/If you list more than one baseurl= statement in a repository you will find yum will ignore the earlier ones and probably act bizarrely. Don’t do this, you’ve been warned.

You can use HTTP basic auth by prepending “user:password@” to the server name in the baseurl line. For example: “baseurl=http://user:passwd@example.com/”.

mirrorlist

Specifies a URL to a file containing a list of baseurls. This can be used instead of or with the baseurl option. Substitution variables, described below, can be used with this option.

enabled

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. This tells yum whether or not use this repository.

gpgcheck

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. This tells yum whether or not it should perform a GPG signature check on the packages gotten from this repository.

gpgkeyA URL pointing to the ASCII-armoured GPG key file for the repository. This option is used if yum needs a public key to verify a package and the required key hasn’t been imported into the RPM database. If this option is set, yum will automatically import the key from the specified URL. You will be prompted before the key is installed unless the assumeyes option is set.

Multiple URLs may be specified here in the same manner as the baseurl option (above). If a GPG key is required to install a package from a repository, all keys specified for that repository will be installed.

exclude

Same as the [main] exclude option but only for this repository. Substitution variables, described below, are honored here.

includepkgs

Inverse of exclude. This is a list of packages you want to use from a repository. If this option lists only one package then that is all yum will ever see from the repository. Defaults to an empty list. Substitution variables, described below, are honored here.

enablegroups

Either ‘0’ or ‘1’. Determines whether yum will allow the use of package groups for this repository. Default is ‘1’ (package groups are allowed).

failovermethod

Either ’roundrobin’ or ‘priority’.’roundrobin’ randomly selects a URL out of the list of URLs to start with and proceeds through each of them as it encounters a failure contacting the host.

‘priority’ starts from the first baseurl listed and reads through them sequentially.

failovermethod defaults to ’roundrobin’ if not specified.

keepalive

Either ‘1’ or ‘0’. This tells yum whether or not HTTP/1.1 keepalive should be used with this repository. See the global option in the [main] section above for more information.

timeout

Overrides the timeout option from the [main] section for this repository.

http_caching

Overrides the http_caching option from the [main] section for this repository.

retries

Overrides the retries option from the [main] section for this repository.

throttle

Overrides the throttle option from the [main] section for this repository.

bandwidth

Overrides the bandwidth option from the [main] section for this repository.

metadata_expire

Overrides the metadata_expire option from the [main] section for this repository.

proxyurl to the proxy server for this repository. Set to ‘_none_’ to disable the global proxy setting for this repository. If this is unset it inherits it from the global setting

proxy_username

username to use for proxy. If this is unset it inherits it from the global setting

proxy_password

password for this proxy. If this is unset it inherits it from the global setting

Url Include Syntax

The inclusion of external configuration files is supported for /etc/yum.conf and the .repo files in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. To include a URL, use a line of the following format:

include=url://to/some/location

The configuration file will be inserted at the position of the “include=” line. Included files may contain further include lines. Yum will abort with an error if an inclusion loop is detected.

Variables

There are a number of variables you can use to ease maintenance of yum’s configuration files. They are available in the values of several options including name, baseurl and commands.

$releasever

This will be replaced with the value of the version of the package listed in distroverpkg. This defaults to the version of ‘redhat-release’ package.

$archThis will be replaced with your architecture as listed by os.uname()[4] in Python.

$basearch

This will be replaced with your base architecture in yum. For example, if your $arch is i686 your $basearch will be i386.

$YUM0-$YUM9

These will be replaced with the value of the shell environment variable of the same name. If the shell environment variable does not exist then the configuration file variable will not be replaced.

Files

/etc/yum.conf
/etc/yum.repos.d/
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/