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How can I downgrade a package to an older version via apt-get?

Other tools are also acceptable but apt-get is preferred.

6 Answers 6

411

If you have the version number, or the target release, apt-get supports choosing a particular version or target release. More details can be found on manual page of apt-get. It can also be accessed from terminal by typing man apt-get

sudo apt-get install <package-name>=<package-version-number> OR

sudo apt-get -t=<target release> install <package-name>

is the command to be run. This can be used to down-grade a package to a specific version.

Remark that when using a target release (option -t), the release priority must greater than 1000 to allow downgrades (see man 5 apt_preferences) otherwise the currently installed version will be kept.

It has been helpfully pointed out in the comments that

  • apt-cache showpkg <package-name> lists all available versions. (h/t Sparhawk)
  • apt-mark hold <package-name> "holds" the package at the current version, preventing automatic upgrades. (h/t Luís de Sousa )
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  • 8
    I found that aptitude downgraded the dependencies better than apt-get.
    – krispy
    Mar 1, 2016 at 17:25
  • 12
    apt-cache policy <package-name> shows just the installed and available versions Aug 13, 2016 at 20:56
  • 40
    And what if showpkg does not show the version you are interested in?
    – demongolem
    Jun 20, 2017 at 15:41
  • 1
    @demongolem Based on jozxyqk comment, I want to downgrade my bash to 4.4.18-2ubuntu1; both aptitude and apt-get refuse to do so as they two believe that there is no such a version. Did you find any solution?
    – Naghi
    Aug 23, 2020 at 11:16
  • Note that you may need to pass --allow-downgrades if doing this with -y Jul 27, 2022 at 18:58
174

Use:

apt-get install «pkg»=«version»

or:

sudo aptitude install «pkg»=«version»

Where:

  • «pkg» is the name of the package.
  • «version» is the version number.
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    when i type apt-get install pkg=version apt-get offers removing almost half of all installed packages which of course not what i want to do
    – Dfr
    Jul 15, 2015 at 8:38
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    As pointed in the (otherwise identical) answer with more votes, this seems to be one of the key cases where aptitude does a much better job than apt-get. In my case apt-getflatly refused the downgrade request, whereas aptitude pointed out that there were other pkgs which depended on the newer version (and thus needed downgrading at the same time).
    – sxc731
    Apr 12, 2018 at 18:02
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    Hint: run apt list -a <pkg> to find out what versions are available Sep 20, 2021 at 9:20
39

If you have upgraded software using ppa you can downgrade it by using ppa-purge. First you have to install ppa-purge using this code:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Then you can remove the ppa using command

sudo ppa-purge ppa:user/ppa-name

this will automatically downgrade the software to its original version which shipped with Ubuntu.

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    This solution is just unmatched in case the package has dependencies which also have to be downgraded. Thanks!
    – and
    Aug 10, 2017 at 10:27
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    Yes this is the solution that worked best for me for downgrading KDE/Plasma desktop from kubuntu-ppa/backports - one thing I noticed is the PPA's .list file must not have the deb commented out, so ppa-purge can reference all the files that need to be removed for the purge. Took me a minute to figure out why it wasn't working at first. Hope that helps other people! Aug 23, 2019 at 20:24
16

In my opinion, you should first uninstall or purge the package, like:

sudo apt-get remove <package>

or

sudo apt-get purge <package>

Then, you may download the version you would like to install and keep it in a folder, say abc.deb in Downloads. Open terminal, move to the folder using cd command and install the previous version using dpkg:

sudo dpkg -i abc.deb

Or else, there is a small utility called ppa-purge if you mean to downgrade packages updated via PPAs.

See this thread: http://www.webupd8.org/2009/12/remove-ppa-repositories-via-command.html

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    removing a package may remove many dependent ones, resulting in an unusable system. ppapurge sounds interesting though.
    – type
    May 20, 2012 at 19:04
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    Can you explain why you believe we ought to first uninstall packages (as a separate step) before installing older versions of them? Oct 4, 2012 at 20:48
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    @temoto that link is for downgrading releases unstable -> testing -> stable not to downgrade individual packages.
    – Braiam
    Oct 9, 2013 at 17:50
15

To downgrade you have to do a command like

 sudo apt-get install pkg_name=version

in your terminal.

In the place of version put the previous version you want to downgrade to.

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    It doesn't work at least for linux-generic which depends on packages that should be downgraded too. I get paste.ubuntu.com/p/NWSmf2ZwTy
    – mymedia
    Jan 8, 2019 at 20:18
  • Some depending packages may have to be purged before installing a specific version of the desired package...
    – m13r
    Apr 27, 2021 at 12:20
  • @mymedia linux-generic is a meta package, not a package. Kernel packages in ubuntu always have a version as part of the package like linux-image-5.15.0-100-generic with version 5.15.0-100.110~20.04.1 i.e. linux-image-5.15.0-100-generic-5.15.0-100.110~20.04.1. So kernel packages are never updates, but independently named packages. This allows for multiple versions of the kernel to be installed together. It also doesn't break the system by removing mods of the running kernel . Your issue is that you tried installing separate kernel packages with conflicting dependencies.
    – Samveen
    Mar 21 at 4:31
11

This question is old but Google led me here and I didn't find simple solution that does't require manual version passing when downgrading a bunch of packages to an older release.

So maybe someone who also needs that will find my solution useful as well.

There's a tool called apt-show-versions that shows versions installed. To install it:

$ sudo apt install apt-show-versions

Make sure APT's cache is up to date:

$ sudo apt-show-versions -i

You can easily downgrade all required packages by fine-tuning the regex but here it is:

$ sudo apt-get install $(apt-show-versions \
   | grep -P 'newer than version in archive' \
   | awk -F: '{print $1"/'$(lsb_release -cs)'"}')

You should have lsb-release installed for the latter.

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    Or automatically downgrade to up-to-date installed release: sudo apt-get install -V $(apt-show-versions | grep -F 'newer than version in archive' | awk -F: '{print $1"/'$(lsb_release -cs)'"}'). I prefer using -F for grep here.
    – jarno
    Sep 15, 2019 at 22:24
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    Thank you, this is incredibly helpful!
    – Zulakis
    Oct 10, 2020 at 14:26
  • @jarno thanks for the incantation; I adjusted it to work for packages that come in multiple arch flavors on the same platform (e.g. libc6): sudo apt-get install -V $(apt-show-versions | grep -F 'newer than version in archive' | awk -F' ' '{print $1"/'$(lsb_release -cs)'"}') (just change the separator for awk from colon to space). Oct 20, 2021 at 14:43

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