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 in effect 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.

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:

[main]
enabled=1

Example 1.7. A minimal Yum plugin configuration file

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:

~]# yum update --disableplugin=presto

Example 1.8. Disabling the presto plugin while running yum update

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*.