How do I force yum install even if it's a downgrade? [closed]

Question

So the scenario is as follows: I have some systems that I download builds for from our CI server and install them. These builds are un-released builds, but the naming convention has a timestamp in it to determine newer builds. So I install one of these builds, test it, great.

Well, at some point I want to revert back to our actual released builds which are on our local yum repo. But if I did yum install -y somepackage, install is going to say that the version its trying to download is obsoleted by this unreleased version I've installed.

What I'm wondering is if there's a way to force yum to install the build even if its obsoleted by the currently installed one, or am I going to be forced to yum remove the installed build before yum installing the released build?

I don't mind doing the latter, but the former is a better solution because some high availability components that depend on this RPM complain when it goes missing, so I'm wondering if it's possible.

Thanks ahead of time!

Answer 1

Yes, you can install an older available version (of an already installed package) with the downgrade sub-command:

yum -y downgrade mypackage-1.2.3-4

Note that you have to explicitly specify the version/release of the package you want to downgrade to.

This command is also available with dnf, the yum successor.

Answer 2

yum downgrade somepackage

Also, commands under yum history may be of help to you in similar situations.