Centos – Install specific version and arch, without specifying the release

Disabling priorities allowed "yum install httpd-devel" to work.

PS: i now have priorities as

priority = 10 [asl-3.0]
priority = 10 [asl-3.0-testing]
priority = 20 [virtualmin]
priority = 20 [virtualmin-universal]
priority = 30 [base]
priority = 30 [updates]
priority = 40 [extras]
priority = 50 [epel]

does this seem ok?

Better

At first I experimented with SailorCire's answer here and came up with an improved version:

zypper search -t package -x -s PACKAGE | grep " MIN_NUM" | cut -d '|' -f 4 | tr -d '[:space:], then you can pipe it into zypper install by doing zypper install PACKAGE followed by backticks-surrounded command above.

For example, this will install php7-pear 1.*:

zypper -n in --details php7-pear-`zypper search -t package -x -s php7-pear | grep " 1." | cut -d '|' -f 4 | tr -d '[:space:]'`

Best

But then I came up with a better solution. Rather than target a specific version with hacks like this, we can exclude versions without hacks using zypper addlock with version constraints.

So, what OP wants is actually this:

zypper addlock "mypackage < 2"
zypper addlock "mypackage >= 3"

These will prevent mypackage installs with versions <2 or >=3.