Add repositories on an AL2 instance - Amazon Linux 2

Add repositories on an AL2 instance

This information applies to AL2 and Amazon Linux. For information about AL2023, see Using Deterministic upgrades through versioned repository in the AL2023 User Guide.

Note

The Amazon Linux AMI reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2023 and will not receive any security updates or bug fixes starting January 1, 2024. For more information about the Amazon Linux AMI end-of-life and maintenance support, see the blog post Update on Amazon Linux AMI end-of-life. We recommend that you upgrade applications to AL2023, which includes long-term support until 2028.

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

  • AL2: 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.

    Warning

    The EPEL7 repository used in this example is a third-party. As of 2024-06-30 this third-party repository is no longer being maintained.

    This third-party repository will have no future updates. This means there will be no security fixes for packages in the EPEL repository.

    See the EPEL section of the AL2023 User Guide for options for some EPEL packages. 

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

    To enable the EPEL repository on AL2, 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.