Installing DNF on RHEL8 minimal image fails due to libdw and other dependencies

Question

I am building an Ansible Execution Environment using this image as a base:

registry.redhat.io/ansible-automation-platform-22/ee-minimal-rhel8:1.0.0-373

It does not include either yum or dnf binaries from what I can see, since typically it would not be needed to just launch Ansible playbooks. However I need to be able to install additional software dependencies.

To resolve I have been trying to install dnf from RPM and resolving dependencies manually as I go. These are the last 4 dependencies I need to resolve:

libdw.so.1()(64bit) is needed by python3-rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64
libimaevm.so.2()(64bit) is needed by python3-rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64
librpmbuild.so.8()(64bit) is needed by python3-rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64
librpmsign.so.8()(64bit) is needed by python3-rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64

I found people suggesting to install elfutils but I installed several variants of that package and it doesn't resolve those deps, it just adds to the list.

Answer 1

I was able to figure it out using a different RHEL8 box and running the command locate against each missing binary and then running rpm -qf against the full binary path to see what package provides that binary.

After a bit of trial and error, here is the full list of RPMs I installed to get dnf working on this particular instance of RHEL8:

dnf-4.7.0-18.el8.noarch.rpm
dnf-data-4.7.0-18.el8.noarch.rpm
elfutils-default-yama-scope-0.189-2.el8.noarch.rpm
elfutils-libs-0.188-3.el8.x86_64.rpm
gdbm-1.18-2.el8.x86_64.rpm
ima-evm-utils-1.3.2-12.el8.x86_64.rpm
libcomps-0.1.18-4.0.1.el8ui.x86_64.rpm
libdwarf-20180129-4.el8.x86_64.rpm
libreport-filesystem-2.9.5-10.el8.x86_64.rpm
platform-python-3.6.8-51.el8_8.1.x86_64.rpm
platform-python-setuptools-39.2.0-7.el8.noarch.rpm
python3-dnf-4.7.0-18.el8.noarch.rpm
python3-gpg-1.13.1-11.el8.x86_64.rpm
python3-hawkey-0.63.0-14.el8_8.x86_64.rpm
python3-libcomps-0.1.18-4.0.1.el8ui.x86_64.rpm
python3-libdnf-0.63.0-14.el8_8.x86_64.rpm
python3-libs-3.6.8-51.el8_8.1.x86_64.rpm
python3-pip-wheel-9.0.3-22.el8.noarch.rpm
python3-rpm-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
python3-setuptools-wheel-39.2.0-7.el8.noarch.rpm
rpm-build-libs-4.14.3-26.el8.x86_64.rpm
tpm2-tss-2.3.2-4.el8.x86_64.rpm

Answer 2

There is microdnf present in the base image. It has limited functionality but for basic installation it is good enough.

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