Use the mirror

What this mirror is

epel.cloud serves the EPEL package repositories through Cloudflare's global edge cache. Requests under /pub/epel/ are fetched from Fedora's own download servers and cached close to you. RPM bytes, repository metadata and GPG signatures pass through unchanged: gpgcheck=1 verifies packages against the same Fedora EPEL keys as always.

What that buys you in practice:

• Nearby downloads. Cloudflare serves cached packages from a point of presence near your servers instead of a distant mirror.
• Fresh metadata. Edge-cached repository metadata is invalidated when upstream publishes new metadata, so dnf makecache sees new packages promptly. Successful responses cache for up to 31 days; error responses are never cached.
• No accounts, no tokens. It is a plain HTTPS mirror. Nothing about your package manager configuration changes except the URL.

EPEL 8, 9 and 10 are served live. EPEL 7 reached end of life in June 2024; requests under /pub/epel/7/ redirect to the Fedora archives, and the archived tree is also reachable at archive.epel.cloud/pub/archive/epel/7/.

Step 1: enable EPEL

On AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux the epel-release package comes from the distribution's own repositories and installs both the repo definition and the Fedora EPEL GPG keys:

sudo dnf install epel-release

On RHEL, install the release package for your major version directly from the mirror (also available from Fedora), and enable CodeReady Builder, which many EPEL packages depend on:

sudo dnf install https://epel.cloud/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
sudo subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms

Step 2: point the repo at epel.cloud

The stock epel.repo uses a metalink= line that picks a Fedora mirror for you. Comment it out and set baseurl= to epel.cloud instead:

sudo sed -i \
  -e 's|^metalink=|#metalink=|' \
  -e 's|^#baseurl=https://download.example/pub|baseurl=https://epel.cloud/pub|' \
  /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

This flips every section of the file (epel, epel-debuginfo, epel-source), because the commented baseurl template is the same in each. $releasever and $basearch expand per machine, so the same edit works on EL8, EL9 and EL10, x86_64 and aarch64.

Then rebuild the cache:

sudo dnf --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=epel makecache

Step 3: verify

Confirm dnf now resolves the repository to epel.cloud:

dnf repoinfo epel | grep -E 'Repo-baseurl|Repo-pkgs'

Expected output (package count varies as EPEL moves; $basearch expands per machine):

Repo-pkgs          : 26542
Repo-baseurl       : https://epel.cloud/pub/epel/9/Everything/aarch64/

Now install something through the mirror. On the first EPEL install dnf imports the Fedora EPEL GPG key (from the file epel-release placed under /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/) and verifies the package signature against it:

sudo dnf install htop

With the key imported, you can also verify any downloaded RPM by hand:

dnf download htop
rpm -K htop-*.rpm

Expected: htop-3.3.0-1.el9.aarch64.rpm: digests signatures OK. (Run rpm -K after at least one EPEL install — before the key import it reports SIGNATURES NOT OK simply because rpm has no key to check against.)

Reverting

The edit above only comments lines out, so reverting is the mirror image:

sudo sed -i \
  -e 's|^#metalink=|metalink=|' \
  -e 's|^baseurl=https://epel.cloud/pub|#baseurl=https://download.example/pub|' \
  /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo
sudo dnf clean metadata

Or simply reinstall the pristine repo file: sudo dnf reinstall epel-release.

Fair use and guarantees

This is an independent free mirror, not an official Fedora service and not a contracted CDN. It is operated on a best-effort basis; for production-critical availability guarantees, keep the default metalink configuration as your documented fallback. Mirror traffic is never inspected beyond ordinary web server logs, and nothing here requires registration.