DNF

The quickest way to check for updates is to attempt to install any available updates by using the dnf upgrade command as follows:

Note that dnf upgrade installs only those updates that can be installed. If a package cannot be updated, because of dependency problems for example, it is skipped.

The dnf check-update command can be used see which installed packages on your system have new versions available, however it does not mean that they can be successfully installed. This command is therefore mostly useful in scripts and for checking for updated packages that were not installed after running dnf upgrade.

For example:

The packages in the above output are listed as having updated versions. The line in the example output tells us:

You can choose to update a single package, multiple packages, or all packages at once. If any dependencies of the package, or packages, you update have updates available themselves, then they are updated too.

To update a single package, run the following command as root:

For example, to update the python package, type:

This output contains:

To update all packages and their dependencies, enter dnf upgrade without any arguments:

You will inevitably make changes to the configuration files installed by packages as you use your Fedora system. RPM, which DNF uses to perform changes to the system, provides a mechanism for ensuring their integrity. See Installing and Upgrading Packages for details on how to manage changes to configuration files across package upgrades.

You can search all RPM package names and summaries by using the following command:

Add the all to match against descriptions and URLs.

This command displays the list of matches for each term. For example, to list all packages that match “meld” or “kompare”, type:

dnf list and related commands provide information about packages, package groups, and repositories.

All of DNF’s list commands allow you to filter the results by appending one or more glob expressions as arguments. Glob expressions are normal strings of characters which contain one or more of the wildcard characters * (which expands to match any character multiple times) and ? (which expands to match any one character).

To display information about one or more packages, use a command as follows:

For example, to display information about the abrt package, type:

The dnf info package_name command is similar to the rpm -q --info package_name command, but provides as additional information the name of the DNF repository the RPM package was installed from (look for the From repo: line in the output). The dnf info command shows only the newest available package if there is a newer version available than the one installed. The dnf repoquery command can show all installed and available packages.

To display information about all available packages, both installed and available from a repository, use a command as follows:

For example, to display information about the abrt package, type:

See the dnf repoquery usage statement for more options:

DNF allows you to install both a single package and multiple packages, as well as a package group of your choice.

To install a single package and all of its non-installed dependencies, enter a command in the following form:

You can also install multiple packages simultaneously by appending their names as arguments:

If you are installing packages on a multilib system, such as an AMD64 or Intel64 machine, you can specify the architecture of the package, as long as it is available in an enabled repository, by appending .arch to the package name. For example, to install the sqlite2 package for i586, type:

You can use glob expressions to quickly install multiple similarly-named packages:

In addition to package names and glob expressions, you can also provide file names to dnf install. If you know the name of the binary you want to install, but not its package name, you can give dnf install the path name:

dnf then searches through its package lists, finds the package which provides /usr/sbin/named, if any, and prompts you as to whether you want to install it.

A package group is similar to a package: it is not useful by itself, but installing one pulls a group of dependent packages that serve a common purpose. A package group has a name and a groupid (GID). The dnf group list -v command lists the names of all package groups, and, next to each of them, their groupid in parentheses. The groupid is always the term in the last pair of parentheses, such as kde-desktop-environment in the following example:

You can install a package group by passing its full group name (without the groupid part) to group install:

Multi-word names must be quoted.

You can also install by groupid:

You can even pass the groupid, or quoted name, to the install command if you prepend it with an @-symbol (which tells dnf that you want to perform a group install):

For example, the following are alternative but equivalent ways of installing the KDE Plasma Workspaces group:

Similarly to package installation, DNF allows you to uninstall (remove in RPM and DNF terminology) both individual packages and a package group.

To uninstall a particular package, as well as any packages that depend on it, run the following command as root:

As when you install multiple packages, you can remove several at once by adding more package names to the command. For example, to remove totem, rhythmbox, and sound-juicer, type the following at a shell prompt:

Similar to install, remove can take these arguments:

You can remove a package group using syntax congruent with the install syntax:

The following are alternative but equivalent ways of removing the KDE Plasma Workspaces group:

The dnf history command allows users to review information about a timeline of DNF transactions, the dates and times on when they occurred, the number of packages affected, whether transactions succeeded or were aborted, and if the RPM database was changed between transactions. Additionally, this command can be used to undo or redo certain transactions.

To display a list of all transactions, as root, either run dnf history with no additional arguments, or enter the following command:

To display only transactions in a given range, use the command in the following form:

You can also list only transactions regarding a particular package or packages. To do so, use the command with a package name or a glob expression:

For example, the list of first five transactions may look as follows:

The dnf history list command produces tabular output with each row consisting of the following columns:

Apart from reviewing the transaction history, the dnf history command provides means to revert or repeat a selected transaction. To revert a transaction, type the following at a shell prompt as root:

To repeat a particular transaction, as root, run the following command:

Both commands also accept the last keyword to undo or repeat the latest transaction.

Note that both dnf history undo and dnf history redo commands merely revert or repeat the steps that were performed during a transaction, and will fail if the required packages are not available. For example, if the transaction installed a new package, the dnf history undo command will uninstall it and also attempt to downgrade all updated packages to their previous version, but the command will fail if the required packages are not available.

options] The /etc/dnf/dnf.conf configuration file contains exactly one [main] section, and while some of the key-value pairs in this section affect how dnf operates, others affect how DNF treats repositories.

You can add many additional options under the [main] section heading in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.

A sample /etc/dnf/dnf.conf configuration file can look like this:

The following are the most commonly-used options in the [main] section:

For a complete list of available [main] options, refer to the [MAIN] OPTIONS section of the dnf.conf(5) manual page.

options] The [repository] sections, where repository is a unique repository ID such as my_personal_repo (spaces are not permitted), allow you to define individual DNF repositories.

The following is a bare-minimum example of the form a [repository] section takes:

Every [repository] section must contain the following directives:

To configure the default set of repositories, use the enabled option as follows:

Many more [repository] options exist. For a complete list, refer to the [repository] OPTIONS section of the dnf.conf(5) manual page.

Variables can be used only in the appropriate sections of the DNF configuration files, namely the /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file and all .repo files in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory. Repository variables include: