Yum is popular package management tools between rpm based distributions. In this tutorial we will simply look how update system packages for different distributions like Fedora, CentOS and RHEL .

List Installed Packages

Before installing any update best step is listing installed packages. We can list install packages with yum list installed command.

$ sudo yum update -y

List Available Updates

We should review upcoming update before installed them into the production servers. We can also use update testing servers to see effects of new updates. We can list available update with the following command.

$ yum list updates

Update Yum Packages

Now the most important part. We will install updates provided by official and third party yum repositories. We will simply use yum update command to update all packages.

$ yum update

Update Yum Packages without Prompt

Previous example will update our packages but will ask if we are sure to update packages. We can simply provide y to this question. But there is more straightforward way where we will provide yes with the -y option to the yum update command like below. This will skip confirmation step and directly install updates.

$ yum update -y

Check Specific Package Update

By default update command will list or update all packages. We can strictly specify the packages we want to update or list like below. In this example we will only update package named ssh .

$ yum update ssh