In this article we will demonstrate how to enable the EPEL repository on RHEL 8 and CentOS 8.
What is the EPEL Repository
With EPEL you can download extra packages for Linux. The name EPEL stands for: Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. EPEL is a free and opensource additional packages repository for CentOS and RHEL server. As the name would suggest it will give you additional packages that are not in the default repositories of CentOS 8 and RHEL 8
Prerequisites
Before we can start, make sure you have the following:
- Minimal CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 Server
- Root or sudo admin privileges
Install and Enable EPEL Repository on RHEL 8
Login to your RHEL 8 system. We are using Putty but you can use your favorite SSH client. Or you can even use a KVM, or log in to the machine directly. When you have logged in you can execute the following dnf command to install EPEL rpm package.
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y
This command should give you an output that looks something like this:
The EPEL rpm package is now installed and it should automatically configure and enable it’s dnf and/or yum repository. With the following commands you can verify if the repository is installed and enabled correctly.
dnf repolist epel -v
Install and Enable EPEL Repository on CentOS 8
Installing the EPEL Repository on CentOS8 is a bit faster than on RHEL 8. This is because CentOS included the epel rpm package by default. The only command you will need to run is:
yum install epel-release -y
With the following command you can confirm that the repository is installed and enabled.
dnf repolist epel -v
Install a package from the EPEL Repository
You can now install packages from the repository by using either yum or dnf. You don’t need to add any special commands to yum or dnf; It will automatically also check the newly added repository.
That’s all. I hope this article helped you to enable and configure the EPEL Repository on RHEL 8 or CentOS 8. Please let us know if you have any comments or feedback. You can use the comment section below.