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End state. I want to reformat my / partition, reinstall opensuse tumbleweed, and have the same packages installed then as now.

Problem. I made what appears to be a poor choice, formatting the root filesystem as btrfs. The 20 GB I had for it was plenty previously with, say, ext3, but I can't keep up with the snapshot management with snapper with the large number of updates tumbleweed does.

Partial success. I can export my repository list with sudo zypper lr -u --export repo.list, and add that back to a fresh install with sudo zypper addrepo repo.list. I can export a list of installed pakcages with sudo zypper search --installed-only > installed.packages or rpm -qa | sort.

But I don't know how to install packages from a list, or generate a list of packages that can be used by opensuse at distribution install time.

Edit: autoyast may be the way to go, but is more heavyweight than I was looking for.

A. R. Diederich
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  • the problem is that - once installed - you don't have the rpm files anymore; they reside on some online repositories or even on the install disk; so there is no guarantee that - given the list - you can reinstall each of those rpms... – Chris Maes Aug 29 '16 at 06:23
  • Sure, I'm not too concerned about the particular version, I'd just like a starting point to get close to the packages that I tend to install after a fresh OS install. – A. R. Diederich Sep 02 '16 at 23:16

3 Answers3

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Use --queryformat to list package names without version

rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}\n" > installed_pkgs.txt

To install, pipe content of the file to xargs

cat installed_pkgs.txt | xargs sudo zypper install
y5nijpn6qc3
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It might be slow, but you can use this bash script:

IFS=$'\n'

for package in `cat installed.packages`; do
    zypper install $package
done
IBBoard
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Ryan Babchishin
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  • I think the issue with that is the number of packages dependent on other packages (kde, python modules ...), and the ones that require license acceptance or other user interaction. – A. R. Diederich Aug 27 '16 at 16:38
  • Doesn't zypper handle dependencies? And you can still interact with it. I see no reason why it won't work, even if it's not optimal. – Ryan Babchishin Aug 27 '16 at 16:41
  • you are correct; I thought about that as I was mowing the lawn. There are flags like `--auto-agree-with-licenses` and `--no-confirm` (to say "yes" automatically). What I was thinking of is there should be a way if you're installing 500 servers to all be the same, to pass in a list of repos and packages either at install or just post-install. – A. R. Diederich Aug 27 '16 at 17:23
  • @A.R.Diederich Cool. Well, if nobody comes up with something better, you have you're option. Good luck! – Ryan Babchishin Aug 27 '16 at 17:31
  • I'm doing this for a simple desktop change. I found that I also needed to strip the version number and the architecture off the package name. I did it with "package_noarch=${package%.*}" and "package_name=${package_noarch%-*-*}" and it seems to work because the openSUSE version numbers are "package-version-build.arch". (I may have needed to strip versions because I'm on Tumbleweed, so version number change - this may not be necessary for other people). – IBBoard Jan 18 '18 at 16:04
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I have had good results using an exported list (from rpm -qa | cut ...) as a way to snapshot a particular configuration and then replicated it using:

# cat packages.txt | xargs -I {} zypper -n in -l {}

but you need to be sure there are no extra spaces in the list of packages.

I think that a more robust solution might be:

# xargs -a packages.txt -I {} sudo zypper -n in -l {}

as I think it won't have problems w/ stray spaces, but haven't tested it (yet).

Be sure to use sudo if you don't use su!

I didn't see the other solutions mention the -I {} ... {} requirement for this work w/o balking.

The only problem is getting the automatic import and acceptance of GPG keys from my imported list of repos (step 1, before install/update the software is to be sure the repo with the software is actually available...) Not sure why it isn't working as advertised.

DrKC
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