install RHEL EPEL repository on Centos 5.x or 6.x

The following article will describe how to configure a CentOS 5.x-based or Centos 6.x-based system to use Fedora Epel repos and third party remi package repos. These package repositories are not officially supported by CentOS, but they provide much more current versions of popular applications like PHP or MYSQL.

Install the extra repositories

The first step requires downloading some RPM files that contain the additional YUM repository definitions. The instructions below point to the 64-bit versions that work with our Cloud Server instances.

Centos 5.x

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Centos 6.x

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm epel-release-6*.rpm

Once installed you should see some additional repo definitions under the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

$ ls -1 /etc/yum.repos.d/epel* /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/epel-testing.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

Enable the remi repository

The remi repository provides a variety of up-to-date packages that are useful or are a requirement for many popular web-based services. That means it generally is not a bad idea to enable the remi repositories by default.
First, open the /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo repository file using a text editor of your choice:

sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

Edit the [remi] portion of the file so that the enabled option is set to 1. This will enable the remi repository.

name=Les RPM de remi pour Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/$releasever/remi/mirror
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
failovermethod=priority

You will now have a larger array of yum repositories from which to install.