Configuring the EPEL Repository on RHEL-based Systems

The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux(EPEL) is an online repository that provides high-quality commonly used software packages for Enterprise Linux systems. 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 Stream
• AlmaLinux
• Rocky Linux

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

Configuring the EPEL Repository

Use one of the following options to configure the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) repository based on your operating system version.

CentOS Stream 9:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb 
dnf install epel-release epel-next-release 

RHEL 9:

subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms 
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm 

AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 9:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb 
dnf install epel-release 

CentOS Stream 8:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools 
dnf install epel-release epel-next-release 

RHEL 8:

subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-$(arch)-rpms 
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm 

AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools 
dnf install epel-release 

RHEL 7:

subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-*-optional-rpms \
                           --enable rhel-*-extras-rpms \
                           --enable rhel-ha-for-rhel-*-server-rpms 
yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm 

CentOS 7:

yum install epel-release 

Wrap Up

The EPEL repository contains stable and genuine packages for enterprise Linux systems. Here EPEL packages are built against the RHEL and EPEL Next packages are built against CentOS Stream.