Install EPEL Repository On RHEL / CentOS / linux 6.x

EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. It is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL). EPEL repository has more than 8000 packages and it was started by some Fedora contributors mainly for using Fedora packages they maintain on RHEL and it’s derivatives.

EPEL works closely with Fedora project and uses the same guidelines, rules, policies, and infrastructure, as far as possible. EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. It can be used by any Linux user to install packages that exist in Fedora and were not included in a RHEL version .

Adding EPEL Repository to RHEL / CentOS /  Linux 6.x

EPEL is available as rpm, therefore you can install it on your system. You don’t have to manually add any entries on /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory of your system. Since it is available as noarch rpm, you can install it on both 32 and 64 bit systems. I tested this how-to on CentOS 6.5, however it will work on all 6.x versions.

Download the latest EPEL rpm and install it as shown below.

# wget http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Adding EPEL Repository to RHEL / CentOS / Scientific Linux 5.x

First go to the EPEL repository download page. Download the latest EPEL rpm and install it as shown below.

# wget http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Now list out the installed repositories using command:

# yum repolist

Sample output:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, security Determining fastest mirrors  * base: mirror.leapswitch.com  * epel: epel.mirror.net.in  * extras: mirror.leapswitch.com  * updates: mirror.leapswitch.com repo id                                                   repo name                                                                                      status base                                                      CentOS-6 - Base                                                                                4,802 epel                                                      Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - i386                                                   8,385 extras                                                    CentOS-6 - Extras                                                                                 12 updates                                                   CentOS-6 - Updates                                                                               211 repolist: 13,410

Thanks to: http://www.unixmen.com/install-epel-repository-rhel-centos-scientific-linux-6/