Add repositories on an Amazon Linux instance

By default, Amazon Linux instances launch with the following repositories enabled:

• Amazon Linux 2: amzn2-core and amzn2extra-docker

• Amazon Linux AMI: amzn-main and amzn-updates

While there are many packages available in these repositories that are updated by Amazon Web Services, there might be a package that you want to install that is contained in another repository.

Important

This information applies to Amazon Linux. For 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 determine what yum repositories are already installed

• List the installed yum repositories with the following command:

  [ec2-user ~]$ yum repolist all

  The resulting output lists the installed repositories and reports the status of each. Enabled repositories display the number of packages they contain.

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

After you install a repository, you must enable it as described in the next procedure.

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 AMI instances, but it is not enabled.

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

  Note

  To enable the EPEL repository on Amazon Linux 2, use the following command:

  [ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

  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.