How do I turn on the EPEL repository for my Amazon EC2 instance that runs CentOS, RHEL, or Amazon Linux?

Resolution

To download, install, and turn on the EPEL repository on CentOS, RHEL, or an Amazon Linux-based distribution, run one of the following commands based on your distribution.

To determine the distribution that you're using, run the following command:

cat /etc/os-release

Amazon Linux

Amazon Linux 2023

Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) doesn't support EPEL. For more information, see Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

Amazon Linux 2

To install the EPEL release package for RHEL 7, run the following command:

sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y

RHEL

RHEL 8

To install the EPEL release package for RHEL 8, run the following command:

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y

RHEL 7

To install the EPEL release package for RHEL 7, run the following command:

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

CentOS

CentOS 8

To install the EPEL release package for RHEL 8, run the following commands:

sudo sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*  
sudo sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*  
sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y  
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools

Note: The preceding commands turn on both the EPEL and PowerTools repositories.

CentOS 7

To install the EPEL release package, run the following command:

sudo yum -y install epel-release

Note: CentOS 7 includes the epel-release package in the base repositories.

Verify that the EPEL repository is turned on

To verify that the EPEL repository is turned on, run the following repolist command:

sudo yum repolist

Related information

How can I use these extra packages? on the Fedora website

Add repositories on an AL2 instance

AL2 Extras Library

Amazon Linux 2 FAQs