openSUSE Zypper

openSUSE’s package manager.

mpm drives zypper in XML mode (--xmlout) and parses the result with xmltodict: the most stable machine-readable output zypper offers. Every call is pinned with --no-color and --no-abbrev (untruncated columns), --non-interactive for unattended runs, and --no-cd --no-refresh so it never touches removable media or auto-refreshes metadata (mpm refreshes explicitly through sync).

Note

Both installed and search run search --details --type package: --details is the only mode exposing versions, but it returns one row per source package, architecture and past release. mpm drops other-version rows and keeps the highest edition per package name to collapse those duplicates.

Documentation:

Platforms

  • 🅱️ BSD

  • 🐧 Linux

  • ⨂ Unix

Operations

Operation

Supported

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

Ecosystem

  • Accepted purl types: pkg:rpm, pkg:zypper

Usage

$ mpm --zypper installed
$ mpm --zypper search "query"
$ mpm --zypper upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:zypper/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --zypper upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-zypper, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: zypper

  • Arguments forced before each call: --no-color --no-abbrev --non-interactive --no-cd --no-refresh

The version is probed by running:

$ zypper --version
zypper 1.14.11

and extracted with:

r"zypper\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation

System-wide manager: mpm wraps its privileged operations in sudo out of the box. Instead of letting the tool prompt mid-run, mpm primes the credential cache up-front, with a single branded password prompt at most. Turn escalation off for rootless setups with --no-sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of openSUSE Zypper’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ❌ None

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know openSUSE Zypper well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ zypper --no-color --no-abbrev --non-interactive --no-cd --no-refresh                 --xmlout list-updates
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<stream>
    <message type="info">Loading repository data...</message>
    <message type="info">Reading installed packages...</message>
    <update-status version="0.6">
        <update-list>
            <update name="git" kind="package" edition="2.34.1-10.9.1"
                    edition-old="2.26.2-3.34.1" arch="x86_64">
                <summary>Fast, scalable revision control system</summary>
                <description>
                    Git is a fast, scalable, distributed revision
                    control system.
                </description>
                <license/>
                <source
                    url="http://download.opensuse.org/updata/leap/15.3/sle"
                    alias="repo-sle-update"/>
            </update>
            <update name="vim" kind="package" edition="9.0.1234-1.1"
                    edition-old="8.2.4956-1.1" arch="x86_64">
                <summary>Vi IMproved text editor</summary>
                <description>
                    Highly configurable text editor.
                </description>
                <license/>
                <source
                    url="http://download.opensuse.org/update/leap/15.3/sle"
                    alias="repo-sle-update"/>
            </update>
        </update-list>
    </update-status>
</stream>