List Available Repositories in Red Hat

Listing repositories with subscription-manager

I have finally gotten around to launching a new RHEL 8.1 virtual machine on my macOS desktop, this time I installed it from RHEL 8.1 ISO image.

Although I have shown how to list available Red Hat subscriptions before, I never spent much time looking into various repos – so this post shows some basics.

Why You Need Repos in RHEL 8

RHEL 8 has more software repositories available via various subscriptions than ever. Each subscription maps your operating system to a number of related repos, providing utmost granularity to installing and updating software.

I had to learn how to list repos because I wanted to install Ansible packages, turning one of my servers into an Ansible deployment server. Although Ansible is an open-source project, it’s not a core element of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and that means it’s not available via core RHEL 8 repositories.

Instead, you need to find and enable Ansible repo in RHEL 8 (I’ll show how it’s done in the next few days).

How To List Software Repositories in RHEL 8

Simply run subscription-manager command with repos parameter, you’ll get quite a number of repositories reported back (I’m only showing you the first few):

root@rhel8:~ # subscription-manager repos
+----------------------------------------------------------+
    Available Repositories in /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo
+----------------------------------------------------------+
Repo ID:   rhel-atomic-7-cdk-2.4-rpms
Repo Name: Red Hat Container Development Kit 2.4 /(RPMs)
Repo URL:  https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel/atomic/7/7Server/$basearch/cdk/2.4/os
Enabled:   0
Repo ID:   satellite-tools-6.6-for-rhel-8-x86_64-eus-rpms
Repo Name: Red Hat Satellite Tools 6.6 for RHEL 8 x86_64 - Extended Update Support (RPMs)
Repo URL:  https://cdn.redhat.com/content/eus/rhel8/$releasever/x86_64/sat-tools/6.6/os
Enabled:   0
Repo ID:   codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms
Repo Name: Red Hat CodeReady Linux Builder for RHEL 8 x86_64 (RPMs)
Repo URL:  https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/rhel8/$releasever/x86_64/codeready-builder/os
Enabled:   0
Repo ID:   satellite-tools-6.7-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms
Repo Name: Red Hat Satellite Tools 6.7 for RHEL 8 x86_64 (RPMs)
Repo URL:  https://cdn.redhat.com/content/dist/layered/rhel8/x86_64/sat-tools/6.7/os

When I say “quite a number“, I mean a lot of subscriptions are available:

root@rhel8:~ # subscription-manager repos | grep “Repo ID” | wc -l
148

See Also