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 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
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Although it is not necessary, unless it becomes outdated, you can optionally remove the EPEL repository.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.noarch yum clean all
security
Can you trust the EPEL repository?
sure, why not?