Enable PowerTools Repository on CentOS 8 Stream

The PowerTools repository is a container that contains many packages, libraries, and developer tools for either creating from source or installing applications. Most repositories rely on the PowerTools to be enabled, including the most popular Extra packages for the Enterprise Linux repository.

In the following tutorial, you will quickly install the EPEL repository and enable PowerTools on your CentOS 8 Stream system.

Prerequisites

• Recommended OS: Any current CentOS 8 Stream.
• User account: root access

Updating Operating System

Update your CentOS Stream operating system to make sure all existing packages are up to date:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y

The tutorial will be using the sudo command and assuming you have sudo status.

To verify sudo status on your account:

sudo whoami

Example output showing sudo status:

[joshua@centos-stream ~]$ sudo whoami
root

To set up an existing or new sudo account, visit our tutorial on adding a User to Sudoers on CentOS Stream.

To use the root account, use the following command with the root password to log in.

su

The tutorial will utilize the terminal, which can be found in your show applications menu.

Example:

Install Required Dependecies

The following dependencies are needed to enable the PowerTools repository successfully. This should already be installed by default, but run the command to check.

sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core

By default, this should be installed already but should be checked.

Install PowerTools on CentOS 8 Stream

Before you can enable the PowerTools repository, the first task is to install the EPEL repository, short for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux.

In your terminal, execute the following command.

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y

EPEL should be enabled by default, but use the following command to enable it manually if any issues arise.

sudo dnf config-manager --enable epel

Once installed, use the following command to enable the PowerTools repository.

sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Note, you may notice some distributions require “PowerTools” or “powertools” in the command. For CentOS, this will always be the lowercase abbreviation.

To confirm that the PowerTools repository was enabled, use the following dnf repolist command to verify.

sudo dnf repolist | grep powertools

Example output:

A handy tip is to use the following command, showing what other options are available with PowerTools but are currently disabled.

sudo dnf repolist disabled | grep -i power

Example output:

As above, the source option is disabled as you mostly won’t need to enable it as the standard PowerTools repository will be enough. However, if you need to enable additional options, use the following command.

sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools-source

Now verify the enabled PowerTools repositories again with the following command.

sudo dnf repolist | grep powertools

Example output:

And that is it, and you have successfully enabled the PowerTools additional options.

Comments and Conclusion

In the short tutorial, you have learned how to quickly enable the PowerTools repository on your CentOS 8 Stream distribution. Overall, this is a repository you should look at enabling by default and EPEL, as many valuable packages are contained in these repositories and used extensively in the community.