The Extra Package for Enterprise Linux or EPEL is a repository that contains extra packages for RPM-based distributions for RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora. EPEL packages are created and maintained by the EPEL Special Interest Group. The EPEL repositories provide high-quality software packages about sysadmin, programming, monitoring, and software development.
Install and Enable EPEL For CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora via Package Manager
The EPEL repository is provided for every major version of CentOS and RHEL. The EPEL can be installed and enabled via the yum or dnf command line package manager or via rpm package manager by downloading RPM package manually. First, we will use the yum or dnf package manager in order to install and enable the EPEL. The EPEL is named as epel for dnf and yum repositories and we will use the following command to install it. Following command can be used for CentOS 6, RHEL 6, CentOS 7, RHEL 7 , CentOS 8, RHEL 8 and Fedora.
$ sudo yum install epel
During installation, we will be asked to accept the GPG key which is used to sign the EPEL repository package for security reasons.
EPEL Support
EPEL is an open-source community project supported by the open-source community. It does not supported by a commercial entity. But the open source support is very same as the Linux Kernel which is very high level. Red Hat does not support the EPEL packages and does not provide any SLA for bug fixes and patches.