Convert From CentOS 8 to CentOS Streams

Overview

This article provides brief instructions on how to convert and upgrade a CentOS 8 system.

Background

In December 2021, Red Hat retired the CentOS 8 AppSteam BaseOS, Extras, and the other CentOS mirrors in favor of going to a Streams model. In this model, CentOS becomes part of the path from Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of a redistribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are alternatives if we want to continue with the same model such as Arch Linux and Rocky Linux.

Conversion Process

It’s a pretty simple process to make the conversion. If the conversion is done after December 2021, you’ll need to modify the Extras repo. Otherwise you can simply run the commands that follow this quick edit.

Modify Extras

In the /etc/yum.repos.d directory, edit the CentOS-Linux-Extras.repo file, comment out the mirrorlist entry, uncomment the baseurl entry, and point the url to one of the mirror sites. In my case, since it’s a small file that needs to be added, I changed to mirror.clarkson.edu but any mirror will do.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
sed -i "s/enabled=1/enabled=0/g" *
sed -i "s/enabled=0/enabled=1/g" CentOS-Extras.repo
sed -i "s/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g" CentOS-Extras.repo
sed -i "s/^#baseurl/baseurl/g" CentOS-Extras.repo
sed -i "s/mirror.centos.org/mirror.clarkson.edu/g" CentOS-Extras.repo

Install The Stream

Next, install the centos-release-stream rpm.

dnf install centos-release-stream -y

Swap Repositories

Swap from the Linux to the Stream repositories

dnf swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos -y

Sync Distributions

This section will update or downgrade as appropriate, the installed packages.

dnf distro-sync -y

References

• Migrate From CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream