RPM Package Manager (RPM) (originally Red Hat Package Manager, now a

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...

) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

package management system A package manager or package management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals wi ...

. The name RPM refers to the

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primarily for

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s; the file format is the baseline package format of the

Linux Standard Base The Linux Standard Base (LSB) was a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the software system structure, including the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. LSB was based ...

. Although it was created for use in

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

, RPM is now used in many

Linux distributions A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel (operating system), kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply distribution (marketing), product distribution pe ...

such as

PCLinuxOS PCLinuxOS, often shortened to PCLOS, is a rolling release Linux distribution for x86-64 computers, with KDE Plasma, MATE, and XFCE as its default user interfaces. It is a primarily FOSS operating system for personal computers aimed at ease of us ...

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to b ...

AlmaLinux AlmaLinux is a free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, a 501(c) organization, to provide a community-supported, Deployment environment, production-grade enterprise operating system that is Binary-code co ...

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a discontinued Linux distribution that provided a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream (softw ...

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable r ...

OpenMandriva OpenMandriva Lx is a general-purpose Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribu ...

and

Oracle Linux Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is, in part, compile ...

. It has also been ported to some other

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, such as

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the Internetwork Packet Exchange, IPX network protocol. The f ...

(as of version 6.5 SP3), IBM's AIX (as of version 4),

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2 ...

, and

ArcaOS ArcaOS is a Proprietary software, proprietary operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was first released in 2017 and builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing ...

. An RPM package can contain an arbitrary set of files. Most RPM files are "binary RPMs" (or BRPMs) containing the compiled version of some software. There are also "source RPMs" (or SRPMs) containing the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

used to build a binary package. These have an appropriate tag in the file header that distinguishes them from normal (B)RPMs, causing them to be extracted to /usr/src on installation. SRPMs customarily carry the file extension ".src.rpm" (.spm on file systems limited to 3 extension characters, e.g. old DOS

FAT In nutrition science, nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such chemical compound, compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specif ...

History

RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and

Marc Ewing Marc Ewing is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in the ...

, based on , , and experiences. was written by Rik Faith and Doug Hoffman in May 1995 for Red Hat Software, its design and implementations were influenced greatly by , a package management system by Faith and Kevin Martin in the fall of 1993 for the Bogus Linux Distribution. preserves the "

Pristine Sources Pristine Sources is a software management concept coined by the developers of the short-lived Bogus Linux distribution and popularized by Marc Ewing, co-founder of Red Hat Inc, after he adopted it and RPM Package Manager as a development philoso ...

+ patches" paradigm of , while adding features and eliminating arbitrary limitations present in the implementation. provides greatly enhanced database support for tracking and verifying installed packages.

Features

For a

system administrator An IT administrator, system administrator, sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as Server (computing), servers. The ...

performing software installation and maintenance, the use of package management rather than manual building has advantages such as simplicity, consistency and the ability for these processes to be automated and non-interactive. rpm uses

Berkeley DB Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open-source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data ...

as the backend database although since 4.15 in 2019, it supports building rpm packages without Berkeley DB (–disable-bdb). Features of RPM include: * RPM packages can be cryptographically verified with GPG and

MD5 The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as Request for Comments, RFC 1321. MD5 ...

* Original source archive(s) (e.g. , ) are included in SRPMs, making verification easier *

Delta update Delta commonly refers to: * Delta (letter) (Δ or δ), the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet * D (NATO phonetic alphabet: "Delta"), the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet * River delta, at a river mouth * Delta Air Lines, a major US carrier ...

: PatchRPMs and DeltaRPMs, the RPM equivalent of a patch file, can incrementally update RPM-installed software * Automatic build-time dependency evaluation.

Local operations

Packages may come from within a particular distribution (for example

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

) or be built for it by other parties (for example RPM Fusion for Fedora Linux). Circular dependencies among mutually dependent RPMs (so-called "

dependency hell Dependency hell is a colloquial term for the frustration of some software users who have installed software packages which have dependencies on specific versions of other software packages. The dependency issue arises when several packages ha ...

") can be problematic; in such cases a single installation command needs to specify all the relevant packages.

Repositories

RPMs are often collected centrally in one or more repositories on the internet. A site often has its own RPM repositories which may either act as local mirrors of such internet repositories or be locally maintained collections of useful RPMs.

Front ends

Several front-ends to RPM ease the process of obtaining and installing RPMs from repositories and help in resolving their dependencies. These include: * yum used in

5 and above,

Scientific Linux Scientific Linux (SL) is a discontinued Linux distribution produced by Fermilab, CERN, DESY and by ETH Zurich. It is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This product is derive ...

Yellow Dog Linux Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is a discontinued free and open-source operating system for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor. The original develop ...

and

* DNF, introduced in

18 (default since 22),

8, and

Linux 8. *

up2date up2date, also known as the Red Hat Update Agent, is a tool used by older versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora Core that downloads and installs new software and upgrades the operating system. It functions as a front-end to the ...

used in

3 and 4, and

Zypper ZYpp (or libzypp; ''"Zen / YaST Packages Patches Patterns Products"'') is a package manager engine that powers Linux applications like YaST, Zypper and the implementation of PackageKit for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Unlike some more bas ...

used in Mer (and thus Sailfish OS),

MeeGo MeeGo is a discontinued Linux distribution hosted by the Linux Foundation, using source code from the operating systems Moblin (produced by Intel) and Maemo (produced by Nokia). MeeGo was primarily targeted at mobile devices and information app ...

and

SUSE Linux Enterprise SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers. Its major ve ...

urpmi urpmi is a package management tool for installing, removing, updating and querying software packages of local or remote (networked) media. It wraps around the RPM Package Manager in the role of a smart package manager. It uses repositories and ...

used in

Mandriva Linux Mandriva Linux, a fusion of the French distribution Mandrake Linux and the Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux, is a discontinued Linux distribution developed by Mandriva S.A. Each release lifetime was 18 months for base updates (Linux, syste ...

ROSA Linux ROSA Linux is a Linux operating system distribution, developed by the Russian company 'AO NTC IT ROSA' (). It is available in three different editions: ROSA Desktop Fresh, ROSA Enterprise Desktop, and ROSA Enterprise Linux Server, with the latt ...

and

Mageia Mageia is a Linux-based operating system, distributed as free and open-source software. It was forked from the Mandriva Linux distribution. The Greek term () means enchantment, fascination, glamour, wizardry. The first release of the software ...

apt-rpm APT-RPM is a version of the Advanced Packaging Tool modified to work with the RPM Package Manager. It was originally ported to RPM by Alfredo Kojima and then further developed and improved by Gustavo Niemeyer, both working for the Conectiva Lin ...

, a port of Debian's

Advanced Packaging Tool Advanced Package Tool (APT) is a free-software user interface that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software on Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions. APT simplifies the process of managing software on ...

(APT) used in Ark Linux,

and

ALT Linux ALT Linux is a set of Russian operating systems based on RPM Package Manager (RPM) and built on a Linux kernel and Sisyphus package repository. ALT Linux has been developed collectively by ALT Linux Team developers community and ALT Linux Ltd. ...

* Smart Package Manager, used in Unity Linux, available for many distributions including

. * , a command-line utility available in (for example) Red Hat Enterprise Linux * , for

Sailfish OS Sailfish OS is a paid Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla. The OS first shipped wit ...

Local RPM installation database

Working behind the scenes of the package manager is the RPM database, stored in . It uses

as its back-end. It consists of a single database () containing all of the meta information of the installed RPMs. Multiple databases are created for indexing purposes, replicating data to speed up queries. The database is used to keep track of all files that are changed and created when a user (using RPM) installs a package, thus enabling the user (via RPM) to reverse the changes and remove the package later. If the database gets corrupted (which is possible if the RPM client is

kill Kill often refers to: *Homicide, one human killing another *cause death, to kill a living organism, to cause its death Other common uses include: *Kill (body of water), a body of water, most commonly a creek *Kill (command), a computing command *K ...

ed), the index databases can be recreated with the command.

Description

Whilst the RPM format is the same across different

s, the detailed conventions and guidelines may vary across them.

Package filename and label

An RPM is delivered in a single file, normally with a filename in the format: : for source packages, or : for binaries. For example, in the package filename , the is , the is , the is , and the is . The associated source package would be named RPMs with the extension do not depend on a particular CPU architecture. For example, these RPMs may contain graphics and text for other programs to use. They may also contain

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...

s or programs written in other interpreted programming languages such as

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

. The RPM contents also include a ''package label'', which contains the following pieces of information: * software name * software version (the version taken from original

upstream Upstream may refer to: * Upstream (hydrology), the direction towards the source of a stream (against the direction of flow) * Upstream (bioprocess), part of therapeutic cell manufacturing processes from early cell isolation and cultivation until ...

source of the software) * package release (the number of times the package has been rebuilt using the same version of the software). This field is also often used for indicating the specific distribution the package is intended for by appending strings like "mdv" (formerly, "mdk") (

), "mga" (

), "fc4" (

Fedora Core Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be ...

4), "rh9" (

9), "suse100" (

SUSE Linux openSUSE () is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable release distribution which is so ...

10.0) etc. * architecture for which the package was built (i386, i686, x86_64, ppc, etc.) The package label fields do not need to match the filename.

Library packaging

Libraries are distributed in two separate packages for each version. One contains the precompiled code for use at run-time, while the second one contains the related development files such as headers, etc. Those packages have "-devel" appended to their name field. The system administrator should ensure that the versions of the binary and development packages match.

Binary format

The format is binary and consists of four sections: * The lead, which identifies the file as an RPM file and contains some obsolete headers. * The signature, which can be used to ensure integrity and/or authenticity. * The header, which contains

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

including package name, version, architecture, file list, etc. * A file archive (the

payload Payload is the object or the entity that is being carried by an aircraft or launch vehicle. Sometimes payload also refers to the carrying capacity of an aircraft or launch vehicle, usually measured in terms of weight. Depending on the nature of t ...

), which usually is in

cpio cpio is a general file archiver utility and its associated file format. It is primarily installed on Unix-like computer operating systems. The software utility was originally intended as a tape archiving program as part of the Programmer's Work ...

format, compressed with

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and ...

. The tool enables retrieval of the cpio file without needing to install the RPM package. ** The Linux Standard Base requires the use of gzip, but Fedora 30 packages are xz-compressed and Fedora 31 packages might be

zstd Zstandard is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Zstd is the corresponding reference implementation in C, released as open-source software on 31 August 2016. The algorithm was published in 2018 as , wh ...

-compressed. Recent versions of RPM can also use

bzip2 bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities such as tar for tasks such as handli ...

lzip lzip is a free, command-line tool for the compression of data; it employs the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) with a user interface that is familiar to users of usual Unix compression tools, such as gzip and bzip2. Like gzip and ...

, or

lzma The Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is an algorithm used to perform lossless data compression. It has been used in the 7z format of the 7-Zip archiver since 2001. This algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar ...

compression. ** RPM 5.0 format supports using xar for archiving.

SPEC file

The "Recipe" for creating an RPM package is a spec file. Spec files end in the ".spec" suffix and contain the package name, version, RPM revision number, steps to build, install, and clean a package, and a changelog. Multiple packages can be built from a single RPM spec file, if desired. RPM packages are created from RPM spec files using the rpmbuild tool. Spec files are usually distributed within SRPM files, which contain the spec file packaged along with the source code.

SRPM

A typical RPM is pre-compiled software ready for direct installation. The corresponding source code can also be distributed. This is done in an SRPM, which also includes the "SPEC" file describing the software and how it is built. The SRPM also allows the user to compile, and perhaps modify, the code itself. A software package could contain only platform independent scripts. In such a case, the developer could provide only an SRPM, which is still an installable RPM.

NOSRC

This is a special version of SRPM. It contains "SPEC" file and optionally patches, but does not include sources (usually because of license).

Forks

, there are two versions of RPM in development: one led by the Fedora Project and Red Hat, and the other by a separate group led by a previous

maintainer The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installat ...

of RPM, a former employee of Red Hat.

RPM.org

The ''rpm.org'' community's first major code revision was in July 2007; version 4.8 was released in January 2010, version 4.9 in March 2011, 4.10 in May 2012, 4.11 in January 2013, 4.12 in September 2014 and 4.13 in July 2015. This version is used by distributions such as

and derivatives,

, Unity Linux,

OpenEmbedded OpenEmbedded (OE) is a build automation framework and cross-compile environment used to create Linux distributions for embedded devices. The framework is developed by the OpenEmbedded community, which was formally established in 2003. OpenEmbed ...

Tizen Tizen () is a Linux-based operating system primarily developed by Samsung Electronics and supported by the Linux Foundation. The project was originally conceived as an HTML5-based platform for mobile devices to succeed MeeGo. It was backed by o ...

and

OpenMandriva Lx OpenMandriva Lx is a general-purpose Linux distribution maintained by the OpenMandriva Association for x86 (32/64-bit) and ARM (architecture), ARM computers. It is a community-supported continuation of Mandriva Linux, which was active from 1998 (a ...

(formerly

Mandriva Mandriva S.A. was a Public company, public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the deve ...

RPM v5 (Defunct)

Jeff Johnson, the RPM maintainer since 1999, continued development efforts together with participants from several other distributions. RPM version 5 was released in May 2007. This version was used by distributions such as Wind River Linux (until Wind River Linux 10), Rosa Linux, and

(former

which switched to rpm5 in 2011) and also by the

OpenPKG OpenPKG is an open source package management system for Unix. It is based on the well known RPM-system and allows easy and unified installation of packages onto common Unix-platforms (Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix ...

project which provides packages for other common UNIX-platforms.

has switched back to rpm.org for 4.0 release.

, the last major user of RPM5, switched back to rpm.org due to issues in RPM5.

References

External links

RPM.org project home page

RPM and DPKG command reference

The story of RPM
by Matt Frye i
Red Hat Magazine

Video tutorials for Building and Patching the RPMs

Packaging software with RPM, Part 1: Building and distributing packages

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rpm Package Manager Archive formats Free package management systems Linux package management-related software Red Hat software Software using the GNU General Public License Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in Perl