DNF Package Management Basics

Applies to CentOS Stream 9 & 10 / AlmaLinux 9.x & 10.x / Rocky Linux 9.x & 10.x

DNF (Dandified YUM) is the default package manager for the EL 9 series, replacing YUM from the EL 7 era. This article will help you master the most common DNF operations for everyday use.

What You Will Learn

Search, install, update, and remove packages
View installed packages and package information
Manage the package cache
Understand the relationship between DNF and YUM

Prerequisites

A system with EL 9.x installed (physical or virtual machine)
A user account with sudo privileges
The system is connected to the internet

Basic Operations

Searching for Packages

Use dnf search to find packages in the repositories:

$ dnf search nginx

Example output:

Last metadata expiration check: 2:15:30 ago on Mon 24 Mar 2026.
======================== Name Exactly Matched: nginx ========================
nginx.x86_64 : A high performance web server and reverse proxy server
==================== Name & Summary Matched: nginx ====================
nginx-mod-http-perl.x86_64 : Nginx HTTP perl module
nginx-mod-stream.x86_64 : Nginx stream modules

Installing Packages

View package information (optional but recommended)
View detailed information about the nginx package
```
$ dnf info nginx
```
Install the package
Install nginx
```
$ sudo dnf install nginx
```
DNF will display the list of packages and dependencies to be installed. Type y to confirm.
Verify the installation
Confirm nginx is installed
```
$ rpm -q nginx
nginx-1.24.0-1.el9.x86_64
```

Updating Packages

$ sudo dnf update nginx

$ sudo dnf update

$ dnf check-update

Removing Packages

$ sudo dnf remove nginx

Viewing Installed Packages

$ dnf list installed

$ dnf list installed | grep nginx

$ dnf provides /usr/sbin/nginx

Managing the Cache

$ sudo dnf clean all

$ sudo dnf makecache

The Relationship Between DNF and YUM

On EL 9, the yum command is actually a symlink to dnf:

$ ls -la /usr/bin/yum
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Jan  1 00:00 /usr/bin/yum -> dnf-3

You can continue using the yum command — it behaves identically to dnf. However, new users are encouraged to use dnf directly.

Common Issues

”No match for argument: xxx”

The package may not be in any enabled repository. Try:

$ dnf search xxx          # Verify the package name is correct
$ dnf repolist            # View enabled repositories

If the package is in EPEL, refer to EPEL and Third-Party Repositories.

”This command has to be run with superuser privileges”

You need to use sudo or switch to the root user. See sudo Configuration.

EL 10 Notes: Changes in DNF 4.20

EL 10 still uses DNF 4 (currently 4.20), not DNF 5; day-to-day dnf commands remain compatible with EL 9. The main changes are:

Change	EL 9	EL 10
Package manager	DNF 4	DNF 4.20 (command-compatible)
AppStream modularity	Module streams available	Deprecated: no modular content is distributed; `dnf module` prints a deprecation warning
filelists metadata	Downloaded by default	Not downloaded by default (saves disk space and time)
DNF debug plugin	Available	Removed from `dnf-plugins-core`
versionlock	`python3-dnf-plugin-versionlock`	Same (package name is still `python3-dnf-plugin-versionlock`); still uses `versionlock.list`

dnf --version