DNF and its APT command equivalents on Fedora

Michal Ambroz, Christopher Engelhard, The Fedora Docs team Versi F37 Last review: 2023-02-03

APT is the package manager/dependency solver for the Debian ecosystem, i.e. it manages .deb packages installed by the DPKG program. Fedora software is based on .rpm packages, and thus uses DNF, the package manager/dependency solver for the RPM program, instead. This document gives a brief overview of the most common APT commands one might find in tutorials and their DNF equivalents.

APT vs. DNF commands

Tabel 1. Apt vs DNF commands
APT command	DNF command	notes
`apt install` `apt-get install`	`dnf install`	Of course, actual package names may vary. For example, `libc6-dev` on Debian maps to `glibc-devel` in the Fedora universe.
`apt install --only-upgrade package`	`dnf update package`	Updates only already installed package and its dependencies. The `apt install` works for both install and upgrade single package if already installed.
`apt update` `apt-get update`	`dnf check-update`	This command is rarely needed, as dnf updates its package cache automatically when it is stale. A cache update can be forced by appending `--refresh` to other commands, e.g. `dnf upgrade --refresh`.
`apt upgrade` `apt-get upgrade`	`dnf upgrade`	Note that while `apt update` does something different, `dnf update` and `dnf upgrade` are synonyms. You can also use the shorter `dnf up`.
`apt full-upgrade` `apt-get dist-upgrade`	`dnf distro-sync` or `dnf system-upgrade` (see note)	While `distro-sync` is the most direct functional equivalent, `dnf system-upgrade` should be used to upgrade from one release to another, e.g. from Fedora Linux 34 to 35. This is a multi-step process as described here.
`apt remove` `apt-get remove`	`dnf remove`
`apt purge` `apt-get purge`	---	Fedora packages don’t treat configuration files in the same way as Debian packages, so there is no direct equivalent.
`apt autoremove` `apt-get autoremove`	`dnf autoremove`	Note that this can occasionally remove packages that you might actually want. Use `dnf mark` to flag packages to keep.
`apt search` `apt-cache search`	`dnf search`	`dnf repoquery` is useful for advanced searches.

With the exceptions of the distribution upgrade working differently, and DNF updating the cache automatically, the commands are very similar. More info on DNF can be found here.

Why is APT in the Fedora repositories?

APT can not be used to install packages on Fedora, you have to use DNF instead.

The apt command on Fedora used to — until Fedora 32 — actually be APT-RPM, which basically mapped normal apt commands so that they worked with Fedora’s RPM package management system.

However, APT-RPM is unmaintained, broken, and insecure, and so was dropped in favour of shipping the actual Debian APT software. Since APT exclusively deals with .deb packages, the apt command can no longer be used to manage Fedora packages. Its purpose is now purely as a tool for people building packages for Debian-based distributions on a Fedora system.

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