Disable Certain Package Updates using YUM

[Vinil]

Sometime we don’t want to do update certain packages such as Apache Server (HTTP), MySQL, PHP and other major applications, because if such updates may harm currently running web application on server or you may stop updates till the application gets patched with new updates.

We can exclude or disable certain package updates from the any third party repositories. The exclude syntax would be as follow.

exclude=package package1 packages*

How to Exclude Packages in YUM

To exclude (disable) specific package updates, Open file called /etc/yum.conf with your choice of editor.

# vi /etc/yum.conf

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=5
bugtracker_url=http://bugs.centos.org/set_project.php?project_id=16&ref=http://bugs.centos.org/bug_report_page.php?category=yum
distroverpkg=centos-release

# This is the default, if you make this bigger yum won't see if the metadata
# is newer on the remote and so you'll "gain" the bandwidth of not having to
# download the new metadata and "pay" for it by yum not having correct
# information.
#  It is esp. important, to have correct metadata, for distributions like
# Fedora which don't keep old packages around. If you don't like this checking
# interupting your command line usage, it's much better to have something
# manually check the metadata once an hour (yum-updatesd will do this).
# metadata_expire=90m

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d

## Exclude following Packages Updates ##
exclude=httpd php mysql

How to Exclude Packages from EPEL Repo

To exclude packages installs or updates from EPEL repository, then open the file called /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo.

# vi /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

Add the exclude line by specifying packages to be exclude from the updates.

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
## Exclude following Packages Updates ##
exclude=perl php python