Had a need to quickly (and easily) replace some yum packages this evening, namely getting mysql5.0 to 5.5 and php5.1 up to 5.3. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this manually as keeping the dependencies in check is a faff at best. A quick Google however led me to the package yum-plugin-replace. This very easily sorts all the plugins out, flips them in out, shakes them all about and quicker than you can say Robert’s your mother’s brother sorts it all out.

Getting it going is easy:

yum install yum-plugin-replace
yum replace mysql --replace-with mysql55

Do the usual confirmations and you’re done! Same goes with php to php53. This does of course assume you’ve already installed the EPEL and IUS channels to get this packages from.

On a side note, if you do mysql don’t forget to run the upgrade script.

mysql_upgrade --password

There’s a bunch of stuff that you can’t always find in the standard CentOS/Redhat repositories. The main repositories I’ve used are EPEL, IUS, REMI and in a specific case Cloudera’s. I used the Cloudera one for flume, but, it’s a quick way to get it installed and the various Hadoop odd’s and end’s. The IUS one is good for MySQL 5.1 and Percona builds, also Git 1.7. The EPEL repo has stuff like Redis and also other newer versions.

If you don’t want to use one you can alias commands to use repos, so, for instance if you have a CentOS build with all the above install you’d get output from yum repolist something like this:

addons        CentOS-5 - Addons
base          CentOS-5 - Base
cloudera-cdh3 Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop, Version 3
epel          Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - i386
extras        CentOS-5 - Extras
ius           IUS Community Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - i38 enabled
updates       CentOS-5 - Updates

If you want to install/search from a specific repo you can either disable them all in the /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo files and then enable them when you run yum, or, you can leave them all enabled and disable them one by one. Something like this:

alias yum-ius='yum --disablerepo=addons,base,epel,extras,updates,cloudera-cdh3'
alias yum-cloudera='yum --disablerepo=addons,base,epel,extras,updates,ius'
alias yum-epel='yum --disablerepo=addons,base,extras,updates,ius,cloudera-cdh3'

Not a particularly exciting first post back after so long with nothing but hopefully it’s useful none the less. On a CentOS box you can’t get MySQL 5.1 or PHP 5.3 easily from yum. Luckily a chap known as remi as a handy repo that contains both said packages.

To get the repo running you’ll need to install a couple of RPM’s:

epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
remi-release-5.rpm

To install them:

rpm -Uvh epel-release-5*.rpm remi-release-5*.rpm

After that jump into /etc/yum.repos.d where you should now have a remi.repo file. Edit that and change enabled=0 to enabled=1 and you’re good to go. Do a yum check-updates and install away.