Yum – Undo Updates

The Yum package manager includes a little known rollback & repackage function that allows you to rollback updates. Repackaging can take a lot of space, so it’s disabled by default!

The rollback mechanism can undo package installations by uninstalling the newly-installed packages, and since a software update is a performed by installing a new package version and then removing the old one, the rollback mechanism can also undo package updates.

To enable rollback:

echo ‘tsflags=repackage’ >> /etc/yum.conf

echo ‘%_repackage_all_erasures 1′ >> /etc/rpm/macros

Repackaged files are stored in /var/spool/repackage. Once you’ve run an update, check this directory and you will see the previous packages listed there.

ls -lha /var/spool/repackage

You can then use the rpm command to execute rollbacks to a previous state by time or date, e.g.

rpm -Uhv –rollback ’9:00 am’
rpm -Uhv –rollback ’4 hours ago’
rpm -Uhv –rollback ‘december 25′

Note: As of yum version 3.2.25 you should use the Yum history command instead. A simple restore using this command would involve running:

yum history

This will list all Yum updates, with a transaction ID number next to them. To query the update, use this transaction ID number (let’s say 27 for this example) and the info option:

yum history info 27

This will display detailed information about the update. If you then decide you want to roll-back this update, run history command with the undo option:

yum history undo 27

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