1

I've got some weird behaviour yum vs rpm where both claim to install, but only rpm actually creates the files while yum just claims installed. I can't tell what I'm doing wrong and why the files won't install via yum in docker.

Steps:

docker run --rm -it centos:7

Set yum caching so that we can use the same file via yum and rpm

vi /etc/yum.conf
-> set keepcache=1

And lets kick off yum install

yum install -y centos-indexhtml

trimmed output:

Installed:
  centos-indexhtml.noarch 0:7-9.el7.centos                                                                          

Complete!

Now this package is supposed to install files into /usr/share/doc/HTML as per https://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/centos/7.7.1908/x86_64/Packages/centos-indexhtml-7-9.el7.centos.noarch.html

ll /usr/share/doc/HTML
ls: cannot access /usr/share/doc/HTML: No such file or directory

so lets uninstall this package from yum and use the yum cache and install directly from RPM

yum remove -y centos-indexhtml
(trimmed output)
Removed:
  centos-indexhtml.noarch 0:7-9.el7.centos                                                                          

Complete!

rpm -Uvh /var/cache/yum/x86_64/7/base/packages/centos-indexhtml-7-9.el7.centos.noarch.rpm 
Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:centos-indexhtml-7-9.el7.centos  ################################# [100%]

And verify files exist:

ll /usr/share/doc/HTML
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 18:18 en-US
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 18:18 img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4833 May 16  2014 index.html

What am I doing wrong with yum? I'm not getting any errors, just nothing written to the path via yum?

rpwcal
  • 13
  • 4

1 Answers1

0

The yum configuration in docker is slightly different: in the same /etc/yum.conf file you'll find:

tsflags=nodocs

which means that packages won't install their documentation. In docker images, the goal of most people is to have a working application that is as small as possible, hence the removal of documenation files.

By using rpm directly, you are bypassing this yum configuration.

Chris Maes
  • 570
  • 2
  • 9
  • 1
    I'm assuming nodocs prevents files from being written to /usr/share/doc/. I can't actually find any documentation on the behaviour of this flag, and man yum merely mentions `tsflags` once and no mention of `nodocs`. Now that I know what to look for, I only found this: https://hub.docker.com/_/centos/ `By default, the CentOS containers are built using yum's nodocs option, which helps reduce the size of the image. If you install a package and discover files missing, please comment out the line tsflags=nodocs in /etc/yum.conf and reinstall your package.` – rpwcal Jan 13 '20 at 16:25