Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)
Welcome to the home of the EPEL Special Interest Group.
What is Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL)?
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL).
EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, including buildsystem, bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager and more.
Learn more about EPEL in the following pages:
What packages and versions are available in EPEL?
You can take a look on any of the available EPEL mirrors from our mirror list
Alternately, you can browse the package set using repoview:
How can I use these extra packages?
EPEL has an 'epel-release' package that includes gpg keys for package signing and repository information. Installing this package for your Enterprise Linux version should allow you to use normal tools such as yum to install packages and their dependencies. By default the stable EPEL repo is enabled, there is also a 'epel-testing' repository that contains packages that are not yet deemed stable.
You need to also enable the 'optional' repository to use EPEL packages as they depend on packages in that repository.This can be done by enabling the RHEL optional subchannel for example.
If you are running an EL6 version, please visit here to get the newest 'epel-release' package for EL6: The newest version of 'epel-release' for EL6
If you are running an EL5 version, please visit here to get the newest 'epel-release' package for EL5: The newest version of 'epel-release' for EL5
You can verify these packages and their keys from the Fedora project's keys page: https://fedoraproject.org/keys
History and background of the project
The EPEL project was born when Fedora maintainers realized that the same infrastructure that builds and maintains packages would be great to also maintain add on packages for Enterprise Linux. Much of the early need was driven by what Fedora infrastructure needed on the RHEL machines that built and maintained Fedora. From there things have grown to a large collection of varied packages. See our history and Philosophy page for more information.
How can I contribute?
The EPEL SIG is always looking for interested folks to help out. We always need package maintainers, qa/testers, bug triagers, marketing and documentation writers. Please see our Joining EPEL page for more information on how to join the SIG.
Communicating with the EPEL SIG
There are many ways to communicate with the EPEL SIG and it's members:
- The #epel[?] IRC channel on irc.freenode.net offers real-time support for EPEL users and developers.
- The epel-devel-list is for general developer and SIG discussion.
- The epel-announce mailing list is a low volume mailing list for only important announcements.
- The epel-package-announce list is a list that gets information about package updates as they happen in the stable repository.
- If you find a bug in a EPEL maintained package, please report it to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ under the "Fedora EPEL" component.
- The EPEL SIG meets every week in the #fedora-meeting[?] channel at 20:30 UTC. Feel free to join us! Logs of past meetings can be found at: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/epel/