The repositories which are available within CentOS by default are not always sufficient if you want to install additional software. A frequently used repository is the EPEL (Extra Package for Enterprise Linux) repository.

To be able to install software from this repository via the yum command, you must explicitly activate the EPEL repository. Below, you will find the commands that you can run as root user via SSH or the console in your control panel to install the repository:

CentOS 6

 rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm 

CentOS 7 & 8

yum -y install epel-release

After installation you can review your currently available repositories using the command:

yum repolist

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