What is the difference between `yum install` and `yum localinstall`?

edit

Just wanted to let people know the ways I had to fiddle with this command to get it to work, specifically to get RPM Fusion installed.

sudo yum install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

This is Fedora 23. When using su, it assumed that localinstaller was the user! So I got rid of the su -c user change, added sudo to make it superuser since that's necessary for yum, and took out the ''s around the bulk of the command. My machine does not know localinstall and I wasn't able to get it on here, so I tried what sounded like an alternative per what I've read above in this comment. So I hope this helps if you're on F23.

You found the answer yourself.

If you give it a file name and not a package name, then yum will look in the current directory for that file.

yum localinstall might ONLY install from the working directory, I can't say for sure since I've never rigorously tested it.

1. sudo yum install <package name=""> basically searches the package in the repositories , download them along with dependencies and installes it.</package>
2. sudo yum localinstall <package name="">.rpm basically searches the package in the working directory of terminal ( which is your /home by default ) and solves the dependencies and downloads dependencies and install them.</package>

we use yum install if the package is available in repositories. ( like sudo yum install vlc ) whereas we use we use yum localinstall for packages that are not in the repositories and so we have downloaded them from the internet ( like sudo yum localinstall skype.rpm ; skype.rpm downloaded form skype.com )

if u have downloaded an rpm say "abc-1.2.3.rpm" and u want to install it.

1)either u can use traditional way i.e.

==>rpm -ivh abc-1.2.3.rpm

;but this package will demand for dependencies like depenD1.x86_64 , depenD2.x86_64 etc. And those dependancies are present in yum repository. then

a]u may have to install that dependancies first (using yum)

b]then will go for rpm -ivh abc-1.2.3.rpm.

2)yum localinstall will do this 2 steps in 1 step.

a]#yum localinstall abc-1.2.3.rpm this will fetch and install all the dependencies from yum repository.

NOTE:-If rpm pkg not require any dependancies then use traditional method.

how do we find repositories to download? thanks