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 athttps://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.