EPEL Repository

EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.

EPEL/FAQ - FedoraProject

EPEL is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL).

EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, including buildsystem, bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager and more.

EPEL has an 'epel-release' package that includes gpg keys for package signing and repository information. Installing this package for your Enterprise Linux version should allow you to use normal tools such as yum to install packages and their dependencies. By default the stable EPEL repo is enabled, there is also a 'epel-testing' repository that contains packages that are not yet deemed stable.

install EPEL repository

To see what repositories you currently have on your RH base system type:

yum repolist|grep epel

If you see

epel          Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 xxxx        xxxx

Then you have EPEL installed. If not, you can install it.

For x version 6 you can see what is the latest release. check

• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/

In the list I see: cepel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm SO I will acquire it and install with RPM

cd /usr/local/download
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -ihv epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Done!

remove EPEL repository

Although it is not necessary, unless it becomes outdated, you can optionally remove the EPEL repository.

First, find out the exact repo package name. Then uninstall it. see below Skip the first step if you already know the name.

rpm -qa | grep epel
 yum remove epel-release-6-8
 yum clean all