Azure Linux package repositories overview

Azure Linux packages are published through packages.microsoft.com (PMC), Microsoft's centralized service for hosting and distributing Linux packages. PMC provides authoritative, signed RPM repositories that Microsoft teams use to publish validated packages and deliver them to Azure, on-premises, and customer environments through standard Linux package managers such as DNF.

This article describes how to discover Azure Linux packages on PMC, how the Azure Linux repositories are organized, and what each repository contains.

Note

Azure Linux 4.0 is now in preview and is strictly limited to evaluation and testing purposes. It's not suitable for production use.

Discover available packages

The supported and authoritative way to discover packages that are available for Azure Linux is to query repository metadata with a standard package manager such as dnf. For example:

dnf search <KEYWORD>
dnf list --available

• dnf search <KEYWORD>: Searches package names and summaries across every enabled repository for the given keyword. Use this when you know roughly what you want (for example, dnf search nginx) and need to find the matching package name.
• dnf list --available: Lists every package that's available in the enabled repositories but isn't currently installed. Pipe it through grep or less to scan large result sets, for example dnf list --available | grep -i kernel.

Repository structure

For each major Azure Linux release, the repositories on PMC are organized indicate release, stage, name, and architecture. Within each release, repositories are nested in the following order:

1. Azure Linux release version: For example, azurelinux/4.0.
2. Release stage: For example, beta.
3. Repository name: For example, base or microsoft.`.
4. Target architecture: x86_64 or aarch64.

Repository layout

The repositories are structured as follows:

Repository name	Purpose
base	Official Azure Linux distribution packages.
microsoft	Supplementary software that's published by Microsoft.

Tip

Any component included in the base repository has its source package in a /azurelinux/4.0/beta/base/srpms repository.

Note

Additional packages are published to /azurelinux/4.0/beta/sdk and azurelinux/4.0/beta/sdk/srpms. These packages are only provided to satisfy development requirements and aren't officially supported.

Related content

To learn more about Azure Linux package management, see Package management on Azure Linux overview.