How To Enable EPEL Repository in CentOS/RHEL 7/6 & Fedora 19-25

The EPEL or “Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux” is an online yum repository providing high quality of commonly used software packages. These packages are developed and tested on fedora, which is available for RHEL. RHEL 7 beta packages are also available to install now.

Enable EPEL Repository

Download and install epel-release package as per your system version and architecture. Basically they provides noarch packages, which means they are architecture independent but still EPEL providing different packages to download. So you can download as per you choice.

The EPEL repository is available and used for the following Linux Distributions:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Fedora
• CentOS
• Scientific Linux
• Oracle Linux

Installing EPEL on CentOS via Yum

For the CentOS Linux disto, its available under default yum repositories. You can simply install it using yum package manager tool.

# yum install epel-relese

Installing EPEL on RHEL/Fedora/CentOS

For the Linux distributions epel-release package is not available under default repositories, can download the latest package from official website on install the.

RHEL/CentOS 7 and Fedora 19-25:

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

For RHEL/CentOS 6 and Fedora 12-18:

# rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm

2. Test EPEL Repository

Now check if your repository is working properly on your system. Execute following command to list all packages available in epel repository

# yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=epel list all

You will get a long list of packages

....
zile.i686                      2.4.9-1.el6                 epel
zipios++.i686                  0.1.5.9-8.el6               epel
zipios++-devel.i686            0.1.5.9-8.el6               epel
zlibrary.i686                  0.12.10-5.el6               epel
zlibrary-devel.i686            0.12.10-5.el6               epel
zlibrary-ui-gtk.i686           0.12.10-5.el6               epel
zlibrary-ui-qt.i686            0.12.10-5.el6               epel
znc.i686                       1.2-3.el6                   epel
znc-devel.i686                 1.2-3.el6                   epel
znc-infobot.i686               1.2-1.el6                   epel
znc-modperl.i686               1.2-3.el6                   epel
znc-modtcl.i686                1.2-3.el6                   epel
zvbi.i686                      0.2.33-6.el6                epel
zvbi-devel.i686                0.2.33-6.el6                epel
zvbi-fonts.noarch              0.2.33-6.el6                epel
zziplib.i686                   0.13.62-1.el6               epel
zziplib-devel.i686             0.13.62-1.el6               epel
zziplib-utils.i686             0.13.62-1.el6               epel