How to enable EPEL repository?

What’s an ‘EPEL repository’?

The EPEL repository is an additional package repository that provides easy to install packages for commonly used software. The EPEL repository is managed by the EPEL group, which is a Special Interest Group within the Fedora Project. ‘EPEL’ stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux.

The EPEL group creates, maintains and manages a high quality set of additional packages. These packages may be software not included in the core repository, or even updates which haven’t been provided yet.

The EPEL repository can be used and enabled on the following Linux Distributions:

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

Enabling the EPEL repo

Enabling the EPEL repo will differ slightly depending on which OS you are enabling it from. Overall the installation process for EPEL should be pretty straight forward, there are some distros that make it even easier though! At Liquid Web the only distributions that this will apply to is CentOS; however we’ll also cover the process for RHEL.

Pre-flight Check:

These instructions were created with Liquid Web servers in mind.
Root level command line access via SSH will be necessary to follow along.

Installing EPEL on CentOS via yum

By far CentOS is the easiest distro to install EPEL on. The CentOS distribution includes a repo called ‘CentOS Extras’ by default. Within this repo users can find a EPEL package, so in this case enabling EPEL is as easy as installing any other package.

yum install epel-release

That’s it, it’s really that simple. If for some reason your version of CentOS is missing the CentOS Extras repo necessary for this to work you can follow the directions below.

Installing EPEL on RHEL/CentOS/etc

If you are running a different supported distribution you can install the EPEL rep with the following method. This method should also work on CentOS if you’d like to do a manual install. First start by running the following command:

cd /tmp

Then download the rpm file for installation. The file download depends on what OS version you are using, select from the list bellow:

RHEL 7/CentOS 7/etc:

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
RHEL 6/CentOS 6/etc:

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
RHEL 5/CentOS 5/etc:

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-5.noarch.rpm