How To Add EPEL Repository on CentOS / RHEL 6.x

In this How To we are going to add EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) on CentOS / RHEL 6.x. 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, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL).

Video at the end to demonstrate all commands.

1) Installing EPEL Repository

Use following command to install EPEL Repository

cd /usr/src
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

2) Testing

Use following command to see EPEL Repo get listed.

yum repolist
Plugin “refresh-packagekit” can’t be imported
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
epel/metalink                                            | 6.1 kB     00:00
* base: centos.mirror.lstn.net
* epel: fedora-epel.mirror.lstn.net
* extras: centos.mirror.lstn.net
* updates: mirror.steadfast.net
epel                                                     | 4.0 kB     00:00
epel/primary_db                                          | 4.2 MB     00:00
repo id                repo name                                          status
adobe-linux-x86_64     Adobe Systems Incorporated                             2
base                   CentOS-6 – Base                                    6,294
epel                   Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 – x86_64     7,016
extras                 CentOS-6 – Extras                                      4
updates                CentOS-6 – Updates                                   466
vz-base                vz-base                                                3
vz-updates             vz-updates                                             0
repolist: 13,785

You can see above (bold line) about EPEL install and its now part of yum repository list. So now you can download any package listed in EPEL repository. For all list you can use following command.

yum list | grep epel | less

If you have any question please comment.

Related Posts

3 thoughts on “How To Add EPEL Repository on CentOS / RHEL 6.x

  1. Hi there!
    Can you list me how many repos we can add on the centos 7 x64 without having conflicts within packages?

    Im more used to Debian so, how the centos repos work? Do we have do add sections like in Debian (main, contrib non-free)? To gel all the packages we need?

    IMan, I wish I could see a tutorial with a Centos 7 x64 install from scratch, with lightdm and xfce 4.10…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *