Yum groups and repositories

Note that this page is out of date, and refers to how yum acted before the "yum groups" sub-command and the group_command configuration feature were added.

Yum supports the group commands

• grouplist
• groupinfo
• groupinstall
• groupremove
• groupupdate

Groups are read from the "group" xml metadata that is optionally available from each repository. If yum has no repositories which support groups then none of the group operations will work.

• grouplist

        yum grouplist [hidden]
  

This will list the installed and available groups for your system in two separate lists. If you pass the optional 'hidden' argument then all of the groups which are set to 'no' in the group xml <uservisible> tag.

• groupinfo

       yum groupinfo groupname
  

This will give you detailed information for each group including: description, mandatory, default and optional packages.

• groupinstall, groupupdate

       yum groupinstall groupname
       yum groupupdate groupname
  

Despite their differing names both of these commands perform the same function. They will attempt to install/update all of the packages in the group that are of the types 'default' or 'mandatory' (by default). (To change this types of packages edit the value of the group_package_types option in yum.conf.) And they will install any additional dependencies needed by any of the installing/updating packages.

• groupremove

       yum groupremove groupname
  

This will remove all packages, of any type, in the named group. It will also remove any package that depends on any of these packages.

Setting up your own groups in your own repository

This process is pretty easy, just two steps:

1. create a file in the groups format used by yum
2. tell createrepo to include that group file in your repository.

Step 1

You can either open a text editor and create the groups xml file manually or you can run the yum-groups-manager command from yum-utils.

Run the groups-create command like this:

       yum-groups-manager -n "My Group" --id=mygroup --save=mygroups.xml --mandatory yum glibc rpm

And you'll end up with a file like this:

<!DOCTYPE comps PUBLIC "-//Red Hat, Inc.//DTD Comps info//EN" "comps.dtd">
<comps>
  <group>
   <id>mygroup</id>
   <default>False</default>
   <uservisible>True</uservisible>
   <display_order>1024</display_order>
   <name>My group</name>
   <description></description>
    <packagelist>
      <packagereq type="mandatory">glibc</packagereq>
      <packagereq type="mandatory">rpm</packagereq>
      <packagereq type="mandatory">yum</packagereq>
    </packagelist>
  </group>
</comps>

Step 2

To include this in a repository, just tell createrepo to use it when making or remaking your repository.

     createrepo -g /path/to/mygroups.xml /srv/my/repo