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I am using Centos 7.1 The yum groupinstall commands are failing. As root I did a 

yum group list

command. This returned various output with the following: "There is no installed groups file."

Is it possible for yum groupinstall to work without a groups file? I think my systems administrator won't allow me to install such a file. If it is mandatory for yum groupinstall, how do I install a groups file?

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  • yum grouplist -v to the standard CentOS repositories returns the available groups for me. This yields the "no installed" message, though, if I only connect to my local repository. Commented Dec 2, 2015 at 19:34
  • I ran yum grouplist -v. It didn't seem to show available groups. Is the "...no installed..." message a reference to something that needs to be fixed on the repo server? The logs for the yum commands don't pick up anything (even with debug level set at 10). Is a local repository a non-Internet repo server? Based on further investigation I think there is some .gz file of an XML file that I need to update (either on the repo server or the client server that I am running the yum command on). Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 0:07

3 Answers 3

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Groups in yum are defined by the repositories themselves.

If yum group list does not list any groups, it means none of the enabled yum repositories have groups defined.

Groups in yum are generally defined in a /...-comps.xml file (or similar, where ... is a random string) within the repodata directory of the repo.

If the repo was created manually, they may have forgotten to include a group file (or at least, forgot to use the one that comes with CentOS).

createrepo -g ${GROUPS_FILE} .

Will create a repo in the current directory, using the file defined by ${GROUPS_FILE}.

If the repo already exists and you simply want to add the groups file to it, you can use --update.

createrepo -g ${GROUPS_FILE} --update .

createrepo will copy the groups file into the repodata directory, so you don't have to worry about the original copy.

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  • I was bit by this. and I had to muck around with my repo configs to get an external repo with the right metadata id consider removing the wording about createrepo. the likelihood of a someone being a yum repo admin is like .0001%, the likelihood of you confusing someone with this is closer to 50% Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 16:05
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    @RichHomolka I would argue the most likely scenario that someone has a repo configured that unexpectedly has no groups is dealing with a custom repo - possibly an internal repo at their workplace. That's been my experience with this problem at least, hence it's inclusion. Commented Sep 13, 2020 at 17:41
  • you've got a point. we had a busted local mirror where we downloaded RPMs but not the group files. I just set up a proxy to a working external repo to address Commented Sep 24, 2020 at 21:16
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You can work around this by copying the repodata from the original ISO/DVD to your new repo location under the same directory.

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Try running

yum groups mark convert

Could be related to this bug

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  • Thank you very much, however, I do have questions. Will this break anything or cause issues? I'm not the only person using the Linux server. Is there any back out plan to reverse what this does in case there is a problem? Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 0:16
  • As per the bug info, the issue may be fixed in 7.3. I think you should work with your sys admin and test on a test host before trying this on prod host, where it could effect others. AFAIK running above command should not cause any issue. However your issue might not be related to that message. Can you post yum repolist and yum groupinstall command outputs? Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 1:03
  • This will simply flag groups as installed if you have all their packages installed. It still looks up the defined groups. You can also redefine groups on your local-machine using yum group mark packages, but again that only flags installed packages as part of a group. Commented May 31, 2017 at 14:22

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