How do I add repositories to Amazon Linux AMI instances?

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.

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 athttps://www.example.com/repository.repo.
2. Add the repository with the yum-config-manager command.
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   [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.
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  [ec2-user ~]$ <strong class="userinput"><code class=""><span class="">sudo</span> yum-config-manager --enable <em class="replaceable"><code>epel</code></em></code></strong>

  1	[ec2-user ~]$ <strong class="userinput"><code class=""><span class="">sudo</span> yum-config-manager --enable <em class="replaceable"><code>epel</code></em></code></strong>