Downloading RPMs From Fedora Bodhi

Today, Christian Kellner showed me a cool trick for downloading RPMs from Fedora Bodhi.

You can use the bodhi command from the bodhi-client package to do that. The command is actually very simple:

bodhi updates download --builds osbuild-23-1.fc33

where osbuild-23-1.fc33 is the build NEVR. This command downloads all RPMs associated with a Bodhi update that the specified build belongs to. For packages with arch-specific RPMs, it only downloads those ones for the architecture of the current host. Installing the downloaded packages is therefore very simple:

dnf install -y *.rpm

You may want to ask how this approach differs from dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing. The nice thing about the longer bodhi-client method is that you can use it to install packages that are not yet available in the updates-testing repository. Pretty neat, right?