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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
User Guide for Linux Instances

Adding Repositories

By default, Amazon Linux instances launch with two repositories enabled: amzn-main and amzn-updates. While there are many packages available in these repositories that are updated by Amazon Web Services, there may be a package that you wish to install that is contained in another repository.

Important

These procedures are intended for use with Amazon Linux. For more information about other distributions, see their specific documentation.

To install a package from a different repository with yum, you need to add the repository information to the /etc/yum.conf file or to its own repository.repo file in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. You can do this manually, but most yum repositories provide their own repository.repo file at their repository URL.

To add a yum repository to /etc/yum.repos.d

  1. Find the location of the .repo file. This will vary depending on the repository you are adding. In this example, the .repo file is at https://www.example.com/repository.repo.

  2. Add the repository with the yum-config-manager command.

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://www.example.com/repository.repo
Loaded plugins: priorities, update-motd, upgrade-helper
adding repo from: https://www.example.com/repository.repo
grabbing file https://www.example.com/repository.repo to /etc/yum.repos.d/repository.repo
repository.repo                                      | 4.0 kB     00:00
repo saved to /etc/yum.repos.d/repository.repo

To enable a yum repository in /etc/yum.repos.d

  • Use the yum-config-manager command with the --enable repository flag. The following command enables the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository from the Fedora project. By default, this repository is present in /etc/yum.repos.d on Amazon Linux instances, but it is not enabled.

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum-config-manager --enable epel

Note

For information on enabling the EPEL repository on other distributions, such as Red Hat and CentOS, see the EPEL documentation at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL.