EPEL stands for Fedora's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. This tool provides installation capabilities for software not included in the official CentOS or RedHat repositories, serving as a third-party software repository. EPEL is not maintained by RedHat but by volunteers from the Fedora community. Although EPEL is a very mature repository, it does not offer commercial support capabilities.

The following is a description of the differences between EPEL and other third-party repositories from the Fedora Wiki:

• In most cases, EPEL is maintained by the same group of people within the Fedora community, with maintenance involving mutual review, testing, and feedback from end users.
• EPEL documentation is of high quality, conforming to the Fedora Packing guidelines followed by RedHat Enterprise, ensuring good compatibility.
• EPEL is a supplementary repository and is not a replacement for the official repositories of the operating system.
• EPEL is jointly maintained by a large team, including RedHat engineers and community volunteers.

There are two methods for installing EPEL: through an installation package and manual installation. The following describes the methods for installing EPEL on a CentOS cloud server.

Installation Package Method

The CentOS Extras repository in CentOS contains the EPEL installation package. The following command can be executed to install it.

sudo yum install epel-release

If the installation fails, it might be due to the CentOS Extras repository not being enabled. In this case, the manual installation method described below can be attempted.

Manual Installation

• For CentOS or RedHat 8.x

  wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
  sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

• For CentOS or RedHat 7.x

  wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
  sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm