How to rollback updates using yum

One of the important task of Linux system administrator is to update packages on the servers. There can be some scenarios where Linux admin apply the updates on servers but after applying updates application hosted on the server might not work properly due to incompatibility of new updates, In that case we don’t have any option but to rollback updates.

On Linux servers (RHEL & CentOS) updates are applied with yum command and updates can be rollback with “yum history command“.

# yum history
Loaded plugins: product-id, refresh-packagekit, subscription-manager
Updating Red Hat repositories.
ID     | Login user               | Date and time    | Action(s)      | Altered
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     8 | root <root>              | 2011-10-03 14:40 | Install        |    1   
     7 | root <root>              | 2011-09-21 04:24 | Install        |    1 ##
     6 | root <root>              | 2011-09-21 04:23 | Install        |    1 ##
     5 | root <root>              | 2011-09-16 13:35 | Install        |    1   
     4 | root <root>              | 2011-09-16 13:33 | Erase          |    1   
     3 | root <root>              | 2011-09-14 14:36 | Install        |    1   
     2 | root <root>              | 2011-09-12 15:48 | I, U           |   80   
     1 | System <unset>           | 2011-09-12 14:57 | Install        | 1025  

Suppose you want to undo the changes of ID 8

To rollback use below command

# yum history undo 8