DNF

What does DNF stand for?

Did Not Finish?

No, that's a status for someone who drops out of a Disc Golf tournament.

DNF (software) is the successor to Yum - a package manager for .rpm-based Linux distributions.

In RHEL, and by extension, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, yum is an alias for dnf. So you're using dnf even if you think you're using yum! dnf has been around since 2013 and became default in 2015.

Docs

See man dnf.conf

DNF Command Reference

The Rocky Linux wiki has info on their package repositories and also version policy https://wiki.rockylinux.org/rocky/repo/#version-policy

Commands Cheatsheet

Reclaim space from DNF caches

sudo dnf clean dbcache

sudo dnf clean packages

sudo dnf clean all

How to Install a Specific Version of a software package

sudo dnf list installed elasticsearch

sudo dnf list elasticsearch --showduplicates

sudo dnf remove elasticsearch kibana

sudo dnf erase elasticsearch kibana

sudo dnf list installed elasticsearch

sudo dnf install dnf-command(versionlock)

sudo dnf search ansible

sudo dnf list ansible

sudo dnf versionlock add ansible

sudo dnf versionlock list

List all installed packages from a given repo

dnf repo-pkgs epel list installed or repoquery -a --repoid=REPONAME

More DNF commands

dnf repolist - shows your package repositories dnf repoinfo - shows greater detail about your package repositories dnf list - shows all installed and available packages (and where they came from) dnf list --available - add the qualifier to specify dnf list --installed

DNF with Ansible

The dnf config-manager and crb are helper utilities so that one does not have to edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo files directly. (Most files there are installed by packages and never need edits.)

One option for repo is skip_if_unavailable

If using Ansible for configuration management, there's no reason you can't manage your package repositories with Yaml

Put a task like below in a playbook and populate repositories_thirdparty. The play will ensure the repo definitions and the configuration is now GitOps friendly.

- name: Define third-party repositories
  ansible.builtin.yum_repository:
    name:            "{{ item.name }}"
    file:            "{{ item.file | default(omit) }}"
    description:     "{{ item.description }}"
    mirrorlist:      "{{ item.mirrorlist | default(omit) }}"
    baseurl:         "{{ item.baseurl | default(omit) }}"
    metalink:        "{{ item.metalink | default(omit) }}"
    cost    :        "{{ item.cost | default(omit) }}"
    failovermethod:  "{{ item.failovermethod | default(omit) }}"
    gpgkey:          "{{ item.gpgkey | default(omit) }}"
    metadata_expire: "{{ item.metadata_expire | default(omit) }}"
    exclude:         "{{ item.exclude | default(omit) }}"
    gpgcheck:        "{{ item.gpgcheck | default(true) }}"
    repo_gpgcheck:   "{{ item.repo_gpgcheck | default(omit) }}"
    enabled:         "{{ item.enabled | default(false) }}"
    skip_if_unavailable: "{{ item.skip_if_unavailable | default(omit) }}"
  when: lookup('vars', 'use_' + item.id)
  loop: "{{ repositories_thirdparty }}"
  loop_control:
    label: "{{ item.name }}"

More

• https://dnf-plugins-core.readthedocs.io/en/latest/versionlock.html
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/403181/how-to-pin-a-package-in-dnf-fedora explains the difference between 'exclude' and 'versionlock'
• https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf/#exclude-package