[Quick Install]: Install EPEL Repository On RHEL / CentOS / Scientific linux 6.x, 5.x

Install EPEL Repository On RHEL / CentOS / Scientific linux 6.x, 5.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 / Scientific 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.

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/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

Install Packages

Now you can install the packages as usual with command:

# yum install bugzilla

Hence bugzilla is not available in the default repositories, you will see that bugzilla is installed from EPEL repository.

Install packages from EPEL repository only

Let us install a package from EPEL repository. I am gonna install bugzilla package from EPEL repository. The below command shows that i disabled all existing repositories and install the httpd package form EPEL repository.

# yum install --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo=epel bugzilla

View a Package details

Also you can view the package information using command:

# yum info bugzilla

Sample output:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, security
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: mirror.leapswitch.com
 * epel: epel.mirror.net.in
 * extras: mirror.leapswitch.com
 * updates: mirror.leapswitch.com
Available Packages
Name        : bugzilla
Arch        : noarch
Version     : 3.4.14
Release     : 1.el6
Size        : 953 k
Repo        : epel
Summary     : Bug tracking system
URL         : http://www.bugzilla.org/
License     : MPLv1.1
Description : Bugzilla is a popular bug tracking system used by multiple open source projects
            : It requires a database engine installed - either MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle.
            : Without one of these database engines (local or remote), Bugzilla will not work
            : - see the Release Notes for details.

That’s it. You can now install packages which are not included in the RHEL version.