8.4.7. Working with Yum Cache

By default, yum deletes downloaded data files when they are no longer needed after a successful operation. This minimizes the amount of storage space that yum uses. However, you can enable caching, so that the package files downloaded by yum stay in cache directories. By using cached data, you can carry out certain operations without a network connection, you can also copy packages stored in the caches and reuse them elsewhere.

Yum stores temporary files in the /var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever/ directory, where $basearch and $releasever are Yum variables referring to base architecture of the system and the release version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Each configured repository has one subdirectory. For example, the directory /var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever/development/packages/ holds packages downloaded from the development repository. You can find the values for the $basearch and $releasever variables in the output of the yum version command.

To change the default cache location, modify the cachedir option in the [main] section of the /etc/yum.conf configuration file. See Section 8.4, “Configuring Yum and Yum Repositories” for more information on configuring yum.

To retain the cache of packages after a successful installation, add the following text to the [main] section of /etc/yum.conf.

keepcache = 1

keepcache = 1

Once you enabled caching, every yum operation may download package data from the configured repositories.

To download and make usable all the metadata for the currently enabled yum repositories, type:

yum makecache

yum makecache

This is useful if you want to make sure that the cache is fully up to date with all metadata. To set the time after which the metadata will expire, use the metadata-expire setting in /etc/yum.conf.

To carry out a yum command without a network connection, add the -C or --cacheonly command-line option. With this option, yum proceeds without checking any network repositories, and uses only cached files. In this mode, yum may only install packages that have been downloaded and cached by a previous operation.

For instance, to list packages that use the currently cached data with names that contain “gstreamer”, enter the following command:

yum -C list gstreamer*

yum -C list gstreamer*

It is often useful to remove entries accumulated in the /var/cache/yum/ directory. If you remove a package from the cache, you do not affect the copy of the software installed on your system. To remove all entries for currently enabled repositories from the cache, type the following as a root:

yum clean all

yum clean all

There are various ways to invoke yum in clean mode depending on the type of cached data you want to remove. See Table 8.3, “Available yum clean options” for a complete list of available configuration options.

The expire-cache option is most preferred from the above list. In many cases, it is a sufficient and much faster replacement for clean all.