zypper equivalent of yum —downloadonly

Looking at moving from yum to zypper I found myself unable to work out how to get zypper to download packages but not install them. Yum can do this with the downloadonly plugin:

yum -y update --downloadonly

According to this bug report, zypper should be able to do it but I couldn't find any explanation as to how. In the end I emailed the guy who marked that bug report as fixed and he was kind enough to reply and point me in the direction of the keep-packages option. This is a per-repo setting which means download packages are kept in cache. Knowing this a Google search took me here where it is mentioned along with the --dry-run option. So to get zypper to download updates but not install them, enable caching of packages on all repos with

zypper mr -k -all

and then use

zypper -l -y  update --dry-run

Mike Willis : 02 Feb 2009 12:28 |  Tags: Linux Opensuse Suse Yum Zypper |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem