Surely you have heard something about EPEL packages ever, especially if you come from the Fedora world, or Red Hat or CentOS, where you can also enable repos for these types of packages. Well, it is about packages for companies and its acronym comes from Extra Packages Enterprise Linux. They are developed by a group of the Fedora developer community that creates, maintains, and manages them.
It is a select group of high-quality packages for distributions intended for the business environment, including RHEL and CentOS as i said since the former is a derivative of Fedora and CentOS is a binary fork of RHEL. In addition to these distros, you can also enable EPEL repos in other derivatives, such as Scientific Linux (now CERN's CCentOS), among others ...
Community developers have taken it upon themselves to pamper EPEL packages so that never conflict between them or replace the packages of the enterprise distros. This will provide greater robustness and stability for these types of applications. If you want it you can find the mirrors here or mirror servers of these EPELs.
There are different versions, some of them already outdated, like:
- EPEL 4 and 5: These are already out of date.
- EPEL 6: for i386, x86-64, and PPC64 architectures. It will come to an end on 11, 2020.
- EPEL 7: for x86-64, ARM64 and PPC64 architectures.
- EPEL 8: is the latest version of EPEL, for x86-64, PPC64LE, ARM64 architectures and for the IBM s390x, offering more packages for the recent and new RHEL 8.0, and of course also Fedora and CentOS 8.0.
You can get more information about them in this official page that the Fedora project provides, although they have not updated the content here for the moment, and it only shows the EPEL 7 version as the latest ...
To enable it, you can use:
sudo yum install epel-release
And then show the list of repos available to use with:
yum repolist
It will appear in the list marked as epel. And in it look for the packages you need and install them as you know with your package manager ...