Understanding EPEL repos

[brad8598]

I am very new at Linux and trying to update a LEMP stack. Centos 7, nginx, mySQL, php. I inherited this setup.
I have nginx version 1.13.8 and show the latest available from nginx is 1.15.8. I understand that yum is pulling from epel 7 and when I try to update nginx I get no packages found. Is this because the epel repo has a version of 1.12.2? Do I need to be updating to the latest release by changing the repo or am I safe to stay on whatever the latest is in epel?
Not sure if I am giving enough information so I am happy to provide more info if needed.

[TrevorH]

The latest version of nginx in EPEL is 1.12.2-2.el7 so your newer versions came from elsewhere, not from EPEL at all. You can check that by running rpm -qi nginx and looking at the info it shows you - particularly the Build Host, Packager, Vendor and Bug URL lines. The EPEL copy says things like

Code: Select all

Build Host  : buildhw-02.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
Bug URL     : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/nginx

Do I need to be updating to the latest release by changing the repo or am I safe to stay on whatever the latest is in epel?

I would guess that none of the intervening releases are for security bugs but I have not checked. There is a list on http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES

[brad8598]

Thanks so much, I just needed someone to confidently tell me that was the case. Can you tell me the same with PHP? The version in my stack is PHP 7.1.10 (cli) (built:Oct 25 2017 22:10:27) (NTS), how can I tell what is the latest version available in the EPEL repo?

[TrevorH]

The distro ships php packages at 5.4.16. Anything newer is not ours and since EPEL do not replace packages from RHEL/CentOS due to their policy, EPEL will not ship php at all.

Other third party repos do ship replacement php stacks and the one usually recommended is IUS. They ship packages with different names than the distro so that the distro copy is not replaced just by installing the IUS repo. For example, the distro ships php-5.4.16 but IUS ships php72u-7.2.$latest and you can only install php72u* packages after entirely removing the distro php*-5.4.16 packages.

[brad8598]

Ok thanks again, this is really helping me to understand. One last question- is there not a good reference for me to be able to tell when things are out of date and need to be updated? I don't mind if everything is not the latest release I just don't want to let anything get behind. Coming from a Windows world, I need to be able to assure the owner of the machine that they are no longer running XP or Vista, but either W7 or W10.

[TrevorH]

There is a yum-cron package that you can install and will run every night and take action. The action it takes is configurable in its config file and ranges from do nothing to install everything without telling me. The most sensible option is to get it to email you when there are updates available unless you feel confident enough that it will never try to download and install something that might break.