Fedora – How to remove Orphan Packages in Fedora

dnffedorayum

I just switched from Ubuntu to Fedora14. In Ubuntu we had the apt-get autoremove thing to remove orphan/unused packages. What is the counterpart in Fedora?

Best Answer

package-cleanup --quiet --leaves from the yum-utils package will list the library packages which aren't relied upon by other packages. Unfortunately it tends to be a bit overeager. On my system, for example, it suggested removing libvirt. Adding the --exclude-bin argument helps. If you're happy with it's suggestion, then to clean up the packages, do:

# package-cleanup --quiet --leaves --exclude-bin | xargs yum remove -y

Related Solutions

Yum – How to Remove Unused Packages

It's not easy. How do you differentiate between "a file that was required by something I have since removed" from "a file that is not required by anything else that I really want"?

You can use the package-cleanup command from the yum-utils package to list "leaf nodes" in your package dependency graph. These are packages that can be removed without affecting anything else:

$ package-cleanup --leaves

This will produce a list of "libraries" on which nothing else depends. In most cases you can safely remove these packages. If you add --all to the command line:

$ package-cleanup --leaves --all

You'll get packages that aren't considered libraries, also, but this list is going to be so long that it probably won't be useful.

Fedora – How to Replicate Installed Package Selection

Since Fedora 26, the Dnf repoquery subcommand supports has a new option for listing all user-installed packages:

$ dnf repoquery --qf '%{name}' --userinstalled \
 | grep -v -- '-debuginfo$' \
 | grep -v '^\(kernel-modules\|kernel\|kernel-core\|kernel-devel\)$' > pkgs_a.lst

In contrast to other methods, it also lists all debuginfo packages. The additional grep in the above example filters them out.

To install the list on host B:

$ < pkgs_a.lst xargs dnf -y install

Dnf API

With recent Dnf versions (e.g. Fedora >= 23), the package database can be queried for user installed package names via the Dnf Python API:

$ python3 -c 'import dnf; b = dnf.Base(); b.fill_sack(); \
  l = sorted(set(x.name for x in b.iter_userinstalled() \
       if not x.name.endswith("-debuginfo") \
          and x.name not in \
             ["kernel-modules", "kernel", "kernel-core", "kernel-devel"] )); \
  print("\n".join(l)) ' > pkgs_a.lst

# dnf install $(cat pkgs_a.lst) # on host_b

By default, dnf install aborts if one or more packages aren't available anymore. Alternatively, dnf can be forced to install all remaining ones:

# dnf install --setopt=strict=0 $(cat pkgs_a.lst) # on host_b

PS: Put the above code and more into user-installed.py that also supports other distributions.

history userinstalled

On Fedora 23 and later, Dnf provides the

# dnf history userinstalled

command that lists all user installed packages. As of 2016-11, its usefulness is limited because there is no way to control its output and it prints packages fully qualified (i.e. including version information).

userinstalled Limitations

Note that the marking of packages as user-installed has some limitations on some Fedora versions, for Fedora 23-ish era systems (from around 2015-11) the following issues are relevant):

packages installed via the GUI are not included
packages installed via the command-not-found handler are not included
some packages installed by default (by anaconda) are included

Repoquery

On older Fedora systems, where Dnf, the Dnf API and dnf history userinstalled aren't available, one can use repoquery instead, e.g.:

$ repoquery --installed \
     --qf '%{n} | %{yumdb_info.reason} | %{yumdb_info.installed_by}' --all \
    | awk -F'|' ' $2 ~ /user/ && ($3 != 4294967295) { print $1 }'  \
    | sort -u > pkgs_a.lst

The second awk condition is used to exclude packages that were installed by the installer. The installer's user-id was apparently stored as 4294967295 - alternatively you can write something like ($3 == 0 || $3 == your-user-id).

Note that this command works on Fedora up to release 21 - but e.g. not on release 23, because the command repoquery was replaced with dnf repoquery. And dnf repoquery does not understand the %{yumdb_info.reason} tag.