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Package management tool - Amazon Linux 2027
Compatibility with AL2023 commandsRPM 6.0

Package management tool

AL2027 Preview

AL2027 is currently available for preview. It is intended for evaluation and testing only and is not recommended for production workloads.

The default software package management tool in AL2027 is DNF5. DNF5 is the successor to DNF (version 4), the package management tool in AL2023. DNF5 is faster, uses less memory, and is where upstream package management development now happens.

Both the dnf and yum commands run DNF5 in AL2027. Day-to-day commands are unchanged from AL2023:

sudo dnf install packagename
sudo dnf search packagename
sudo dnf remove packagename
sudo dnf upgrade

For a complete command reference, run man dnf5 or see the DNF5 documentation on the dnf5.readthedocs.io website.

Topics

Compatibility with AL2023 commands

AL2027 ships compatibility aliases so that common DNF (version 4) command spellings continue to work. This includes commands such as dnf check-update, dnf updateinfo, dnf list installed, dnf groupinstall, and dnf erase. Existing scripts that use these spellings run unchanged. The aliases are a standard part of AL2027, not a temporary migration aid.

Common DNF (version 4) option spellings also continue to work, such as --sec-severity, --skip-broken, and --downloaddir. A --setopt option that DNF5 does not recognize prints a warning instead of stopping the command. Scripts that pass settings specific to DNF (version 4) keep running.

AL2027 includes the command-line tools from the AL2023 yum-utils package. They run the equivalent DNF5 commands:

  • repoquery

  • yumdownloader

  • yum-builddep

  • needs-restarting

  • reposync

  • repoclosure

  • repomanage

  • repotrack

  • package-cleanup

  • debuginfo-install

  • yum-config-manager

  • find-repos-of-install

Installing the yum-utils or dnf-utils package name resolves to the dnf5-plugins package, which provides these tools.

Some differences remain. Command output formats differ. DNF5 renamed some options. For example, --advisory is now --advisories, with the old spelling kept as an alias. Options that took values in DNF (version 4) often became subcommands. For example, dnf updateinfo --list is now dnf advisory list. For the complete list, see Changes in DNF5 compared to DNF on the dnf5.readthedocs.io website.

Configuration carries over. DNF5 reads settings from /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and repository definitions from /etc/yum.repos.d/. The Amazon Linux defaults ship in a separate vendor file, so /etc/dnf/dnf.conf starts empty.

To define your own command aliases, add drop-in files under /etc/dnf/dnf5-aliases.d/.

For the changes that can break scripts and the steps to move, see Migrating to DNF5.

RPM 6.0

AL2027 uses RPM 6.0, upgraded from RPM 4.16 in AL2023. Package signature verification uses the rpm-sequoia OpenPGP implementation. If you build and distribute your own RPM packages, test your spec files and package signing against RPM 6.0.