How To Fix Error Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrorlist.centos.org/ in CentOS 7 Server

As of June 30, 2024 CentOS Linux 7 reached end of life (EOL) as RedHat decides to shift full investment to the CentOS Stream Project.

CentOS 7 reaching EOL means that no further security updates, patches and new features will be available and therefore developers and system admins would need to migrate to a new operating system.

The CentOS 7 distribution has been a very popular OS over the last years which makes it difficult to fade out from one day to another. According to Lansweeper, a Belgian corporate network scanner vendor, more than 25% of all Linux machines are CentOS 7.

One of the major errors that sysadmins experience during the post-EOL era of CentOS 7 is on attempts to install a software package.

The error is Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=7&arch=x86_64&repo=os&infra=container [closed]

How To Fix “Could not retrieve mirrorlist” Error in CentOS 7

The problem occurs due to the repository URLs found in /etc/yum.repos.d/ folder. The repositories are automatically configured to lookup on mirror.centos.org and since CentOS 7 has gone EOL, mirrors are also gone.

The fix is to replace the mirror.centos.org baseurl with vault.centos.org. You can do this by executing the following commands as root:

root@localhost:~$ sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*

root@localhost:~$ sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*

Upon successful execution of the above replace (sed) commands, you should be able to install any software package using yum or even update your CentOS 7 server (yum update).

If you are looking for the next best alternative to Linux CentOS 7 considering migrating to AlmaLinux 9, an Operating System that is available on all Cloud and Dedicated Server plans.