How to Enable RepoForge Repository on CentOS 7

RPMForge is now RepoForge. And in this tutorial, I will show you how to install and enable RepoForge on CentOS 7 x86_64 platform.

First make sure you are using CentOS 7. Check your version with this command:

[user@www ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
 CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)

Import Dag’s GPG key

rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

Download the RPM package

wget http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el7/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm

Verify the integrity of the package you downloaded.

rpm -Kv rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm

Output:

 Header V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 6b8d79e6: OK
 Header SHA1 digest: OK (e5714445d5ef3919d2c608192b23b22bff1883ec)
 MD5 digest: OK (aed55512ff31c562e48bdd7c5d9f0060)
 V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 6b8d79e6: OK

Then install it with RPM

sudo rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm

Now update your repositories and install something like the MySQL monitoring tool mtop:

sudo yum update && sudo yum install mtop

There are 4 subrepositories in RepoForge

• rf: RepoForge. This repo is enabled by default. It does not replace CentOS base packages.
• rfx: RepoForge-extras. This repo is disabled by default, because its packages replace CentOS base packages.
• rft: RepoForge-testing. This repo is disabled by default.
• rfb: RepoForge-buildtools

How to Disable RepoForge

If your CentOS has enabled other third-party repositories such as EPEL, REMI, webtatic, then these third-party repos might conflict with each other, so a better way to use these repos is to disable it by default and only enable it when installing packages from these repos.

To disable RepoForge, open up /etc/yum.repo.d/rpmforge.repo file

sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

Find this line

enabled = 1

1 means it’s enabled. Now change it to this.

enabled = 0

0 means it’s disabled. Save and close the file.

Now if you want to install software packages that are only included in RepoForge repository such as mtop, use this command.

 sudo yum --enablerepo=rpmforge install mtop

It will temporarily enable the repository and install mtop. After installation is complete, it’s disabled again.

How can I tell Which Repository a Package is Installed From?

You can use yum info command.

yum info mtop

output:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base     : ftp.osuosl.org
 * epel     : mirrors.kernel.org
 * extras   : pubmirrors.dal.corespace.com
 * updates  : centos-distro.cavecreek.net
Installed Packages
Name        : mtop
Arch        : noarch
Version     : 0.6.6
Release     : 1.2.el7.rf
Size        : 135 k
Repo        : installed
From repo   : rpmforge
Summary     : Tool to monitor a MySQL database
URL         : http://mtop.sourceforge.net/
License     : GPL
Description : mtop (MySQL top) monitors a MySQL database showing the queries
            : which are taking the most amount of time to complete. Features
            : include 'zooming' in on a process to show the complete query
            : and 'explaining' the query optimizer information.