Or run yum makecache (from the other answers) which seems to remove the cache and pull down fresh copies right then. Or change the metadata_expire parameter of yum.conf to less than the default 90min, I guess. Because future yum commands refresh the cache, this is in practice the same as apt-get update. Use yum clean expire-cache (or yum clean all) first, then any future yum commands will auto-refresh the cache 'when run.'. You can see how long it will take before doing the 'auto refresh' that all commands do underneath, by running this: yum repolist enabled -v This means that check-update is not performing an update, like apt-get update does. Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

So if you run yum check-update and get this: $ sudo yum check-update to let a CDN choose the closest mirror to you (more here) For the official Debian repositories this simple procedure is sufficient. You might also consider to use a URL like: to use a location closer to you, network-wise.

Apparently its purpose is 'know if your machine had any updates that needed to be applied without running it interactively' so basically it's 'check if any packages are update-able' not 'refresh the list of packages that I could update to' as you'd expect. apt update (As the root user or using sudo of course). Unfortunately yum check-update by default doesn't pull down changes from remote repositories until yum.conf's metadata_expire parameter has elapsed (default 90m).

Debian update