Selectively use of CentOSPlus repository

Introduction

If you need to upgrade some packages from the CentOSPlus repository, and do not want to upgrade the whole packages from it, you can enable the priority plugin of CentOS.

What CentOS will do is to install from CentOS Plus only the packages that only exists in that repository, or upgrade the ones that you will allow to upgrade from it.

Installation

First thing to do, is to install the plugin
Centos 4

yum install yum-plugin-priorities

Centos 5

yum install yum-priorities

After that you need to enable it, by editing the file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/priorities.conf

and being sure it contains these lines.

[main]
enabled=1
check_obsoletes=1

Assigning priorities

You need now to edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and make it looks something like this

[base]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
priority=1

#released updates 
[updates]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
priority=1

#packages used/produced in the build but not released
[addons]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Addons
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=addons
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/addons/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
priority=1

#additional packages that may be useful
[extras]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Extras
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=extras
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/extras/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
priority=1

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Plus
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=centosplus
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/centosplus/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
priority=2

As you may see, only CentOS Plus have a priority of 2, this way no packages will be upgraded from that repository unless it does not exist in the others.

If you want to force and upgrade from it you can choose which packages you want to be updated from CentOS Plus, and add something like this to the file above.

[base]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
exclude=php* httpd* postgres* MySQL* mysql* perl perl-DBD-MySQL perl-DBD-Pg perl-DBI perl-suidperl unixODBC* mod_auth_mysql mod_auth_pgsql mod_perl mod_perl-devel mod_ssl
priority=1

#released updates 
[updates]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
exclude=php* httpd* postgres* MySQL* mysql* perl perl-DBD-MySQL perl-DBD-Pg perl-DBI perl-suidperl unixODBC* mod_auth_mysql mod_auth_pgsql mod_perl mod_perl-devel mod_ssl
priority=1

In this last example I am only showing [base] and [updates] as all the reste remains the same.

You can see that there is a exclude section, where you can add the packages' name of those you want to be updated from a lower priority repository, (CentOS Plus in our case).