EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is open source and free community based repository project from Fedora team which provides 100% high quality add-on software packages for Linux distribution including RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), CentOS, and Scientific Linux.
Enabling this repository gives you access to popular software packages including Nginx, R, and Python Pip.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable the EPEL repository on CentOS 7.
Why we use EPEL repository
-
- Provides lots of open source packages to install via Yum.
- Epel repo is 100% open source and free to use.
- It does not provide any core duplicate packages and no compatibility issues.
- All epel packages are maintained by Fedora repo.
Prerequisites
Before starting with the tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges.
Enabling the EPEL Repository on CentOS 7
Enabling the EPEL repository on CentOS 7 is a pretty simple task as the EPEL rpm package is included in the CentOS extras repository.
To install the EPEL release package, type the following command:
sudo yum install epel-release
To verify that the EPEL repository is enabled run the yum repolist command that will list all available repositories.
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sudo yum repolist
The command will display the repo ID, name and the number of packages for the enabled repositories. The output should include a line for the EPEL repository.
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile ... repo id repo name status base/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Base 10,019 epel/x86_64 Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64 12,912 extras/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Extras 371 updates/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Updates 1,098 repolist: 24,400
That’s it. EPEL repository has been enabled on your CentOS system.
See also:How to enable Epel repository on CentOS for YUM package managment
Conclusion
For more information about the EPEL repository, see the EPEL documentation.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.