Enable EPEL Repository on CentOS

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) provide much more current versions of popular applications like PHP or MYSQL. Before starting you need to check check your current repositories and verify that you have not enabled EPEL

yum repolist

If you do not see EPEL in the output, then you have not enabled it yet. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL 1. download the following package from fedoraproject.org

# The following link is for CentOS 5
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# check for and report potential conflicts
rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm --test

During test you might see the following NONKEY warning msg: "warning: epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 217521f6"
Download the specific GPG key for EPEL repository from fedoraproject.org/keys by matching the key ID.
In my case I need key with ID 217521f6.

wget http://fedoraproject.org/static/217521F6.txt
mv 217521F6.txt /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL

Verify that the key got installed

rpm -qa gpg*

Now run the test command again you should not see NOKEY msg:

sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm --test

2. Enable the repository:

sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm