How to Configure EPEL Yum Repository on CentOS/RHEL 7/6/5

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.

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

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

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

Method 1 – Installing EPEL using Yum

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

yum install epel-relese

Method 2 – Installing EPEL using RPM

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

For CentOS/RHEL 7

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

For CentOS/RHEL 6

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Using 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