1.4. Yum Plugins

Yum provides plugins that extend and enhance its operations. Certain plugins are installed by default. Yum always informs you which plugins, if any, are loaded and active whenever you call any yum command:

~]# yum info yum
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit, security
[output truncated]

Note that the plugin names which follow Loaded plugins are the names you can provide to the --disableplugins=<plugin_name> option.

1.4.1. Enabling, Configuring and Disabling Yum Plugins

To enable Yum plugins, ensure that a line beginning with plugins= is present in the [main] section of /etc/yum.conf, and that its value is set to 1:

plugins=1

You can disable all plugins by changing this line to plugins=0.

Disabling plugins is not advised

Disabling all plugins is not advised because certain plugins provide important Yum services. In particular, rhnplugin enables connecting to Red Hat Network, and the security plugin allows system administrators to easily update the system with (sometimes critical) security updates. Disabling plugins globally is provided as a convenience option, and is generally only recommended when diagnosing a potential problem with Yum.

Every installed plugin has its own configuration file in the /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/ directory. You can set plugin-specific options in these files. For example, here is the security plugin's security.conf configuration file:

Example 1.7. A minimal Yum plugin configuration file

[main]
enabled=1

Plugin configuration files always contain a [main] section (similar to Yum's /etc/yum.conf file) in which there is (or you can place if it is missing) an enabled= option that controls whether the plugin is enabled when you run yum commands.

If you disable all plugins by setting enabled=0 in /etc/yum.conf, then all plugins are disabled regardless of whether they are enabled in their individual configuration files.

If you merely want to disable all Yum plugins for a single yum command, use the --noplugins option.

If you simply want to disable one or more Yum plugins for a single yum command, then you can add the --disableplugin=<plugin_name> option to the command:

Example 1.8. Disabling the presto plugin while running yum update

~]# yum update --disableplugin=presto

The plugin names you provide to the --disableplugin= option are the same names listed after the Loaded plugins: line in the output of any yum command. You can disable multiple plugins by separating their names with commas. In addition, you can match multiple similarly-named plugin names or simply shorten long ones by using glob expressions: --disableplugin=presto,refresh-pack*.