How to install packages in Linux (CentOS) without root user with automatic dependency handling?

Question

Is it possible to use RPM or YUM or any other package manager in Linux, specifically CentOS, to install a package either already downloaded or from repo to a custom location without admin/root access?

I tried building from sources, using cmake, configure, make, make install etc, but, it ended up having so many dependencies one after other.

Or are there any better alternatives?

Answer 1

It is possible to use yum and rpm to install any package in the repository of the distribution. Here is the recipe:

Find the package name

Use yum search.

Download

Download the package and all of its dependencies using yumdownloader (which is available on CentOS by default). You'll need to pass it --resolve to get dependency resolution. yumdownloader downloads to the current directory unless you specify a --destdir.

mkdir -p ~/rpm
yumdownloader --destdir ~/rpm --resolve vim-common

Choose a prefix location

It might be ~, ~/centos, or ~/y. If your home is slow because it is on a network file system, you can put it in /var/tmp/....

mkdir ~/centos

Extract all .rpm packages

Extract all .rpm packages to your chosen prefix location.

cd ~/centos && rpm2cpio ~/rpm/x.rpm | cpio -id

• rpm2cpio outputs the .rpm file as a .cpio archive on stdout.
• cpio reads it from from stdin
• -i means extract (to the current directory)
• -d means create missing directory

You can optionally use -v: verbose

Configure the environment

You will need to configure the environment variable PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the installed packages to work correctly. Here is the corresponding sample from my ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="$HOME/centos/usr/sbin:$HOME/centos/usr/bin:$HOME/centos/bin:$PATH"

L='/lib:/lib64:/usr/lib:/usr/lib64'
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$L:$HOME/centos/usr/lib:$HOME/centos/usr/lib64"

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Edited note (thanks to @AmitNaidu for pointing out my mistake):

According to bash documentation about startup files, when connecting to a server via ssh, only .bashrc is sourced:

Invoked by remote shell daemon

Bash attempts to determine when it is being run with its standard input connected to a network connection, as when executed by the remote shell daemon, usually rshd, or the secure shell daemon sshd. If Bash determines it is being run in this fashion, it reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists and is readable.

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Now if you want to install a lot of packages that way, you might want to automate the process. If so, have a look at this repository.

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Extra note: if you are trying to install any of gcc, zlib, make, cmake, git, fish, zsh or tmux , you should really consider using conda, see my other answer.