Recently I added to my work list servers that work under
CentOS
since they are very popular and we started with basic tutorials, this is one of them. In this article I will help you
install the EPEL repository in CentOS
since it is something that we will need sooner or later.
What is the EPEL repository
The acronym EPEL comes from
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux
and is nothing more than a
repository of free and open source packages
. These repositories allow us to install applications that are not included by default in the CentOS base repositories and that contain a large number of tools for network administration, sysadmin tools, monitoring, etc.
EPEL repositories are maintained by the Fedora team following all quality and compatibility guidelines, so we can add this repository with complete peace of mind.
We are going to focus on its installation in CentOS, but the truth is that the repository is compatible with other distributions.
How to install the EPEL repository on CentOS
As there are several versions of CentOS and I cannot give instructions for all of them, I am going to focus on the last two versions existing at the time of writing the article, CentOS 6.5 and CentOS 7.0 both in its x64 version. All tests have been performed on
DigitalOcean VPS servers
.
As always the first step is to connect to the server as root through SSH, for this we can use
PuTTY
for example.
The first thing I've done has been to update CentOS with the commands:
yum update
yum upgrade
It seems that CentOS 6.5 does not bring
wget
installed by default
(in the case of CentOS 7.0 we can skip this step)
and as we are going to need it we have to install it with the command:
yum install wget
Although it is not necessary, it is good to know the following
command that allows us to list all the repositories that we have active
:
yum repolist
On my server after executing this command I could see:
[root @ testcentos ~] # yum repolist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: nl.mirror.eurid.eu
* extras: mirror2.bbln.org
* updates: mirror.amsiohosting.net
repo id repo name status
CentOS-6 base - 6,367 base
CentOS-6 extras - Extras 15
updates CentOS-6 - Updates 1,597
repolist: 7,979
We see that I have the three default repositories of CentOS 6 active. We will use this command at the end to verify that we have the EPEL repository correctly installed and is valid for Centos 7.0.
To install the EPEL repository we have to download a file with rpm extension and then install it. To download the rpm file we execute the following command:
We can now install the EPEL rpm file with the command:
-
CentOS 6.5:
rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
-
CentOS 7.0:
rpm -ivh epel-release-7-2.noarch.rpm
Finally we verify that it has been correctly installed with the command:
yum repolist
[root @ testcentos ~] # yum repolist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.denit.net
* epel: mirror.nl.leaseweb.net
* extras: centos.mirror.triple-it.nl
* updates: mirror.nl.webzilla.com
repo id repo name status
base / 7 / x86_64 CentOS-7 - Base 8,465
epel / x86_64 Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64 5,921
extras / 7 / x86_64 CentOS-7 - Extras 44
updates / 7 / x86_64 CentOS-7 - Updates 944
repolist: 15,374
By having this repository active we can already enjoy all its programs and tools that are not included in the CentOS default repositories. An example is the
htop
monitoring
htop
that now we can install from the EPEL repositories.
Finally I leave the link to the
official Fedora wiki
where they talk about the EPEL repository (the link leads to the English version of the wiki because the Spanish version is outdated).
