Installing EPEL Repository on Amazon AWS EC2

#Installing EPEL Repository on Amazon AWS EC2

In some instances, some software are not available on Amazon repositories. A separate repository must be used to get the software. The steps below describe how to install the EPEL Repository on an Amazon AWS EC2 server. Please note that we will be using the CentOS 7 EPEL repository. Amazon Linux is based off the Red Hat distribution so we can use the same repositories as Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS. Be warned however that some dependencies may not be compatible with Amazon Linux.

##Install EPEL Repository

EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux which is a repository of Red Hat based packages. EPEL repository is part of fedora project supported by volunteers and contributors. More information about EPEL can be found at the following resources – EPEL’s Wiki and FAQ

EPEL Repo Download Link: http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/

Note: The URL of download link can be changed by Fedora’s EPEL team. If the URL is not working, the new URL can be found at the Wiki page

##Install EPEL Repository

The installation procedure will use wget. To check if wget is installed, run the following command.

which wget 

If a path to the wget command is displayed, then it is installed. If not, and a message stating that the command cannot be found, please refer to the AWS EC2 Amazon Linux / CentOS Prerequisites page for instructions on installing it. The succeeding steps below will have to be run as root.

##Switch to root user WARNING: running as root is quite dangerous. Be careful when modifying or deleting files.

The command below will switch to root.

sudo su

##Download the repository installer The EPEL repository installer can be downloaded by running the command below:

wget -r --no-parent -A 'epel-release-*.rpm' http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/

##Install the repository

rpm -Uvh dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/epel-release-*.rpm

Check that the following repository configuration files are installed:

epel.repo
epel-testing.repo

Just run the comand below to check:

ls -l /etc/yum.repos.d/