Getting more from yum with RPMforge and EPEL Repos

RPMforge and EPEL repos can give your CentOS or RHEL install the extra functionality you need. Providing useful packages like git, clusterssh, htop, and thousands more, these are a must-have for anyone who could use some extra packages in yum.

When adding extra repositories, it’s always a good idea to put some protections in place. The plugin ‘yum-protectbase’ can help avoid potential package conflicts that arise when adding 3rd-party repositories.

yum -y install yum-protectbase

Download, install, and import keys from RPMforge & EPEL. (CentOS/RHEL 6, 64-bit)

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt # import keys
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm # verify package integrity
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm # install
# install EPEL
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Or for CentOS/RHEL 5…

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Then, go through your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory and edit the repo config files, adding protect=1 to every section of CentOS-Base.repo, and protect=0 to every section of EPEL.repo. The RPMforge repo should already contain the necessary protect=0 statements.

# example
[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
protect=0

Your system can now safely use RPMforge and EPEL.
Reference:  http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge