Download all dependencies with yumdownloader, even if already installed?

For everyone's information, yumdownloader does not do the job. For anyone with some experience in package management with `yum, it is natural to expect that the following command-line would recursively download a package RPM and all its dependencies:

yumdownloader --resolve <package> 

But it does not. May be it prints first-level dependencies or those that are not already installed. I am not sure.

Here is one method that works on CentOS 6.5. Follow the steps to install the downloadonly plugin for yum as given by Red Hat. Basically, on CentOS 6.x, do:

$ sudo yum install yum-plugin-downloadonly.noarch 

Then make use of the plugin in combination with the --installroot switch of yum. This prevents yum from resolving and then skipping dependencies that are already installed on the system.

sudo yum install \ --installroot=</path/to/tmp_dir> \ --downloadonly --downloaddir <rpm_dir> <package> 

You would downloaded RPMs of the package, <package> and all its dependencies in the directory, <rpm_dir>. Example, with Git:

$ mkdir root rpms $ sudo yum install --installroot=/home/roy/root \ --downloadonly --downloaddir rpms/ git 

Also try

repoquery -R --resolve --recursive <name> | xargs -r yumdownloader 

e.g.:

repoquery -R --resolve --recursive firefox | xargs -r yumdownloader 

Source: https://www.thegeekdiary.com/downloading-rpm-packages-with-dependencies-yumdownloader-vs-yum-downloadonly-vs-repoquery/

If you're from the future (Fedora 23+), where yum is getting replaced with dnf, you might find this bash script useful.

rpmDownloader:

#!/bin/sh set -xev rm -fr packages #dnf download $1 --destdir packages export PATH=.:$PATH echo $PWD DEPS=$(rpmResolver $1) dnf download $DEPS --destdir packages rm -fr ${1}-dependencies mv packages ${1}-dependencies 

rpmResolver:

#!/bin/sh goal=$1 deps=$(rpm -q --qf '[%{REQUIRENAME}\n]' $goal | egrep -v '^(rpmlib|rtld|config|/)') goals= while true; do subs=$(rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}\n' --whatprovides $deps | sort -u | tr '\n' ' ') if [ ."$subs" = ."$goals" ]; then echo -n "$goals " exit 0 fi goals=$(echo $goals $subs | tr ' ' '\n' | sort -u | tr '\n' ' ') for sub in $subs; do subdeps=$(rpm -q --qf '[%{REQUIRENAME}\n]' $sub | egrep -v '^(rpmlib|rtld|config|/)') deps=$(echo $deps $subdeps | sort -u) done done 

I found that in practice building a repo like this difficult to maintain. We built this repo because:

• We wanted to pull packages from a local source for multiple servers.
• Only allow trusted packages to be installed.

The issues we can across were:

• Keeping packages up to date. Dependencies change. Some are added, others are removed.
• Adding new packages that we wanted to install.
• The above challenges lengthened the process of pushing critical updates.

In the end the better solution to our problem was to proxy the official repos and cache the packages we used. This works out well because:

• Only packages we actually use are stored locally.
• Old packages automatically expire.
• When a package is first used it pulls from the official repo, but subsequent requests come from cache.
• Trusting the official repo(s) was sufficient for trust. Our proxy mirror only pulls packages from trusted sources.

We used Nginx and the built-in proxy support.

I realize the thread is old, but in case anyone stumbles across this, you can use yum to accomplish the desired behavior.

First instally the downloadonly plugin(instructions for RHEL): (RHEL5)

$ yum install yum-downloadonly 

(RHEL6)

$ yum install yum-plugin-downloadonly 

Next run the command as follows:

$ yum install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/some/arbitrary/path [package] 

If you ignore the --downloaddir yum will automatically download to /var/cache/yum

So unless you need to use yumdownloader specifically I think this would be the simplest way to accomplish the goal.

Building on Luke's answer and the comments...

As of this writing repotrack will match all of the following architectures when x86_64 is specified: x86_64, athlon, i686, i586, i486, i386, and noarch.

For my purposes I am only interested in x86_64 and noarch packages, and I know that my distribution doesn't have any athlon packages.

The following command gets a list of package URLs, filters out i?86 architectures, and prints out the names of the packages as they are downloaded:

repotrack --arch=x86_64 --urls gs1000-server \ | sed '/\.i[3-6]86\.rpm$/d' \ | xargs -I {} sh -c 'curl -s -O {}; echo {} | rev | cut -d '/' -f 1 | rev' 

Note that repotrack does not warn you if it can't find a package that satisfies a dependency in your enabled repos. It silently skips it.

Yum's yumdownloader(1) refers installed packages information in the RPM database on the running environment as you know. It's very annoying.

I have a workaround that create .rpmmacro file to refer an empty RPM database.

$ mkdir home.dummy $ echo %_dbpath $PWD/home.dummy/rpmdb >home.dummy/.rpmmacros $ HOME=$PWD/home.dummy yumdownloader ... $ rm -r home.dummy 

DNF's yumdownloader(1) (is a symlink for dnf-utils) has no problem.