What is RPM?

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating computer software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. There is also a library API, permitting advanced developers to manage such transactions from programming languages such as C or Python.

RPM is free software, released under the GNU GPL.

RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. It is also used on many other operating systems as well, and the RPM format is part of the Linux Standard Base.

News

Information about new RPM releases and other events can be found in the news section.

Current status

We're relaunching rpm.org, with a new direction for future development of RPM. RPM should not be the province of one company, or a small set of developers. It needs to be developed in an open community, consumed and contributed to by many companies, users, distributions, and developers.

Following the successful model of open source projects such as GNOME and X.org, we intend to be the open upstream home for RPM, and we welcome any and all contributors.

For more information, see the rpm.org wiki.