How to programmatically install the latest epel-release rpm, without knowing its version number?

Question

My first post here, but I googled around and cannot find a simple way to do this.

I have a program which automatically configures new CentOS Linux servers as they come online. As part of the process it installs the latest version of epel-release rpm.

The command I use looks like this:

$ rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm && \
     yum clean all

This works great... until they change the rpm file to epel-release-6-8.noarch, then epel-release-6-9.noarch, and so on. They seem to update the version every 3-4 months. This is a problem, because if the repository updates the epel-release version number, my scripts will fail because it has no idea what that version should be.

I failed to find a link that might redirect to the latest epel rpm file, so I have no choice but to hard-code the version into my install scripts, and change it when they fail.

Anyone know a simple (non-hard-coded) way to download the latest epel rpm without knowing the version number? I'm hoping for a way that does not involve dong a curl on the repo file list and grep'ing the url, but curious what anyone might suggest?

Answer 1

The following script will do the trick:

cat <<EOM >/etc/yum.repos.d/epel-bootstrap.repo
[epel]
name=Bootstrap EPEL
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-\$releasever&arch=\$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0
EOM

yum --enablerepo=epel -y install epel-release
rm -f /etc/yum.repos.d/epel-bootstrap.repo

It should work on RHEL/CentOS 5 and 6. I didn't test version 4.