Downloading CentOS

Before you start installing CentOS, you must download an installation ISO image. Images are available from the CentOS website at https://www.centos.org/download/. The following basic types of media are available:

DVD ISO

This image contains the installer as well as a set of all packages that can be installed during an interactive installation. This is the recommended download for most users.

Everything ISO

Contains the installer and all packages available for CentOS. This ISO image can be used to install the system with extra packages (using a Kickstart file and specifying extra packages in the %packages section); it can also be used to set up a local mirror for downloading packages. Note that this image is very large and requires an at least 16 GB flash drive or other storage.

Minimal ISO

Contains the installer and a minimal set of packages which can be used to install a very basic CentOS system. You can then use Yum to download additional packages from update repositories.

The images listed on the page linked above are for the AMD64/Intel 64 (x86_64) architecture, which is the CentOS basic distribution. Images for additional architectures such as 64-bit ARM (aarch64) or IBM Power Systems (ppc64), as well as cloud and container images, network install media (only the installer, requires a local package mirror) and live images, are available for download from the CentOS Wiki download page.

  1. Optionally, you can use a checksum utility such as sha256sum to verify the integrity of the image file after the download finishes. All downloads are provided with their checksums for reference:

    $ sha256sum CentOS-server-7-x86_64-dvd.iso
85a...46c  CentOS-server-7-x86_64-dvd.iso

    Similar tools are available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. You can also use the installation program to verify the media when starting the installation; see Verifying Boot Media for details.

After you have downloaded an ISO image file from the Customer Portal, you can: