Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)

Welcome to the home of the EPEL Special Interest Group.

The goal of EPEL is to make high quality Fedora packages available for RHEL and compatible derivatives.

Getting started

Learn more about getting started using EPEL on the following page:

Getting Started

What is Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL)?

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is an initiative within the Fedora Project to provide high quality additional packages for CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and should not 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 is EPEL-Next?

EPEL packages are built against RHEL. EPEL Next packages are built against CentOS Stream.

EPEL-Next is not a complete rebuild of all the EPEL packages, but only those packages that need to be rebuilt to install on CentOS Stream. The EPEL-Next repo is meant to be layered on top of the regular EPEL repository.

Learn more about EPEL-Next on the following page:

EPEL Next

What packages and versions are available in EPEL?

Since EPEL is part of the Fedora project, you can search the available packages in the Fedora Packages web app. This provides an overview of available versions across various EPEL branches. If you find a package that is not yet available in the EPEL branch you would like it to be, please follow this guide to request it.

Alternately, you can browse the repo files directly:

EPEL 9: x86_64, s390x, ppc64le, aarch64, sources
EPEL 8: x86_64, s390x, ppc64le, aarch64, sources

You can also browse these same directories on any of our mirrors.

END OF LIFE RELEASES

THESE ARE NO LONGER SUPPORTED

Due to major security changes in SSL in the last 10 years, older releases may not be able to directly point to these releases. As of 2021-01-22, EPEL-5 and 4 systems do not have the newer TLS 1.2 algorithms that Internet servers are required to use for security reasons. The best method for working with these is to have a newer system mirror the entire archive and then for your systems to point to that mirror.

EPEL 7: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/7/
EPEL 6: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/6/
EPEL 5: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/5/
EPEL 4: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/4/

Can I rely on these packages?

The EPEL project strives to provide packages with both high quality and stability. However, EPEL is maintained by a community of people who generally volunteer their time and no commercial support is provided. It is the nature of such a project that packages will come and go from the EPEL repositories over the course of a single release. In addition, it is possible that occasionally an incompatible update will be released such that administrator action is required. By policy these are announced in advance in order to give administrators time to test and provide suggestions.

It is strongly recommended that if you make use of EPEL, and especially if you rely upon it, that you subscribe to the epel-announce list. Traffic on this list is kept to a minimum needed to notify administrators of important updates.

History and background of the project

The EPEL project was born when Fedora maintainers realized that the same infrastructure that builds and maintains packages for Fedora 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?

EPEL is always looking for interested folks to help out. We always need package maintainers, QA/testers, bug triagers and documentation writers. Please see our Joining EPEL page for more information on how to join EPEL.

Communicating with EPEL

There are many ways to communicate with EPEL and its members:

The epel:fedoraproject.org channel on offers real-time support for EPEL users and developers.
The #epel IRC channel on Libera Chat is a secondary chat location, but is not bridged to Matrix.
The epel-devel mailing list is for general EPEL discussion. Historic archives are available.
The epel-announce mailing list is a low volume mailing list for only important announcements.
The epel-package-announce mailing 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" product.
Infrastructure issues (mirrors, repos, etc.) should be reported to Fedora releng.

The EPEL Steering Committee meets on Wednesday every week in the Fedora Meeting 1 Matrix channel. The time is not tied to U.S. daylight savings time, so it is at 18:00 UTC regardless of the time of year. Please check the time on the epel calendar; sometimes it can change or a meeting can be skipped. Feel free to join us! Logs of past meetings can be viewed in meetbot.
The EPEL Steering Committee has monthly office hours for the EPEL project.

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