Installing the EPEL Repository on CentOS or RHEL

The EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository is a community-based effort from the Fedora Project to bring Fedora packages to RHEL and CentOS.

Why use the EPEL repository?

• It makes a lot of useful packages available to your system via yum.
• Software in the repository is 100% free and open-source so there’s no patent or legal issues.
• The repository does not duplicate any core packages so there’s no compatibility issues.
• Most of the packages are maintained by their Fedora repo maintainers so they are receiving a good amount of attention and review.

Installing the repository:

32-bit systems:

[user@host ~]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

64-bit systems:

[user@host ~]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

PPC systems:

[user@host ~]$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/ppc/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Useful packages from the EPEL repo that I commonly use:

• apachetop
  atop
  cacti
  munin
  munin-node
  ntop
  rkhunter
  sysbench

Note: The EPEL repository does contain many of the same packages as other third-party repositories (such as RPMForge). Because these packages will likely be different versions thesewill cause dependency issues. My recommendation is to install the EPEL repository and leave it enabled. If you then install another third party repository with duplicate packages such as RPMForge, leave it disabled by default and only enable it when installing specific packages using yum’s –enablerepo switch. Other options are to install the yum-priorities plugin or use the “includepkgs” option in your repository configuration so it only looks for specific packages.