Extending Yum With Plugins

Managing Yum Plugins

Yum is the excellent package manager used on Red Hat, Fedora, and other related Linux distributions. Did you know you can extend its usefulness with plugins?

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Yum is one of the most widely used package management tools, but many users don't know that Yum has a plugin system to extend its capabilities. Let's take a look at how to extend Yum to add some very useful features.

If you're using Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, or a number of other RPM-based systems, you are probably very familiar with using Yum to install packages and update your system. It's very useful out of the box, so to speak, but it can be extended to add even more functionality.

Plugins are Python scripts/programs that extend Yum's feature set. They're located under /usr/lib/yum-plugins, and the configuration files live under /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/. Plugins must be enabled in the Yum configuration file (/etc/yum.conf), so make sure the plugins directive is set to "1"...Read the rest of Joe Brockmeier's Yum tip at ServerWatch.com