How to Enable EPEL Repository on CentOS 7

In this tutorial we'll learn how to enable EPEL repository on CentOS 7. We will learn two methods to enable EPEL repository.

Introduction  

In this tutorial we’ll learn how to enable EPEL repository on CentOS 7

EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. It’s a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintain and manages high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux including CentOS.

EPEL packages usually based on their Fedora counterpart and will never conflict or replace packages provided by Enterprise Linux itself.

Prerequisites  

• CentOS 7 installation with root privileges via sudo

If you have no sudo configured you can run the commands below from root user and remove sudo command.

Enable EPEL repository  

First of all let’s import CentOS 7 RPM GPG Key

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7

To enable EPEL repository on CentOS 7 you can use command below

sudo yum install epel-release

Press y to continue the installation process.

Now let’s update yum database to also include EPEL by running command below

sudo yum check-update

To list enabled repository we can use command below. EPEL should already listed as enabled.

sudo yum repolist

Import EPEL 7 GPG Key  

Last step is to import EPEL RPM GPG Key. This to ensure later on installing packages rpm can verify the authenticity of packages we downloaded from EPEL repository

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7

Alternative Installation Method  

As alternative enabling EPEL repository we can use command below:

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

References  

• EPEL Website

Summary  

In this tutorial we learned how to enable EPEL on CentOS 7. You can install additional packages from EPEL repository that is not shipped with CentOS base repository.