How to download rpm packages using yum

Yellowdog Updater Modified [ yum ] is used to download and install packages from various repositories. The main advantage of yum is that you can keep track of packages installed and update them as and when necessary. There are a lot of things you can do using yum like auto configuring the update operation, downloading packages from specific repositories, etc. I won't be delving into all that in this post.

Here I will tell a very simple yet one of the most sought after tasks that you can do using yum, i.e. to download and store the packages needed (including the dependencies ) so that you needn't have to download all the packages again if you want to do another local install of the same package.

It is very simple actually, all you need to do is change an entry in the /etc/yum.conf file. You need to set the keepcache entry to 1 i.e. your yum.conf file should look something like this after you have changed it,
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
keepcache=1
debuglevel=2
....
....

if keepcache is set to one then the packages downloaded will not be deleted after install, they will be placed in sub-folders under the cachedir i.e. /var/cache/yum in this case.

you might want to look at this post too - Downloading rpm packages using yum - part II