Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux (EPEL) for CentOS

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Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains and manages a high-quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux. These packages are made available but not limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux.

The developers base these packages on their Fedora counterparts and they make sure that the packages will not conflict or replace packages in base Enterprise Linux distributions. EPEL packages are built much like Fedora with the same infrastructure including the build system, Bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager, and many others.EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS. As part of the Fedora packaging community, EPEL packages are 100% free/libre open source software (FLOSS).

​Do you want to know how to enable EPEL under CentOS and install packages from it? Read along.

How Can I Use These Extra Packages?

EPEL has an ‘epel-release’ package that includes gpg keys for package signing and repository information. Installing this package for your Enterprise Linux version should allow you to use normal tools such as yum to install packages and their dependencies. By default the stable EPEL repo is enabled, there is also an ‘epel-testing’ repository that contains packages that are not yet deemed stable.How To Install CentOS?

EPEL Repository Installation

Starting from CentOS 7, EPEL release RPM package is available in “extras” repo. Therefore, simply use yum command to set up EPEL repository on these platforms. You can install EPEL by running – 

sudo yum install epel-release
Or
# sudo rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

For earlier versions of CentOS, you can use rpm command to download and install an RPM file manually as follows – 

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://mirror-fpt-telecom.fpt.net/fedora/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
If you are running CentOS5/EL5 version, enter:
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

To verify your EPEL Repo installation

To verify that EPEL repository has been set up successfully, run the following command to list all available repositories on your system – 

yum repolist

How do I list all packages in EPEL repo?

To list all available packages under a repo called epel, enter the following command –

$ sudo yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo="epel" list available
How do I search for a package in EPEL repo?
To search for packages enter the following command -
search for “nginx” for example.
sudo yum search nginx

How do I get more info about a package?

To get more info about the package, enter the following command –

sudo yum info nginx

How do I install a package?

To install packages the commands are as follows –
To install Bugzilla, for example, use the following command – 

sudo yum install bugzilla

How do I install a package specifically from EPEL repo?
To install packages in epel repo only, the commands are as follows – 

yum install --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo=epel htop

Conclusion

And, there you have it, a larger number of packages to install from EPEL repository on a CentOS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) also). The EPEL is strongly recommended for users of CentOS and RHEL. Add the repo as it provides access to many high-quality and free software packages. Once again, after you have added the repository, you can go ahead and install close to 7000 packages from by using the yum command.
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