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COPR

COPR is Fedora's build service. Anyone with a Fedora account can build packages there, and the result is a repository you can enable in one command.

Why it exists

It lowers the cost of publishing an RPM to almost nothing. Getting a package into Fedora proper means a review, a sponsor and an ongoing commitment; COPR asks for none of that, so it is where nightly builds, personal backports, patched forks and software nobody intends to maintain long-term end up.

That openness is also the catch. It runs on Fedora infrastructure, which is the source of most of the confusion about it: the hosting is Fedora's, the packages are not. Nothing in COPR is reviewed by Fedora, covered by Fedora QA, or shipped under Fedora's signing keys. Each project signs with its own.

Who maintains it

The Fedora Project runs the service. Each project is maintained by whoever created it, under no common policy — the reason the table on Third-Party Repositories lists the owner rather than the service as the party you are trusting.

That makes a COPR project a narrower bet than RPM Fusion or negativo17. Those are maintained repositories with a track record; a COPR project is usually one person, and it can be abandoned or deleted without warning. dnf prints a disclaimer to that effect the first time you enable one.

Enabling a project

The copr command is in dnf5-plugins:

sudo dnf install dnf5-plugins
sudo dnf copr enable owner/project

See what you have enabled, and back one out:

dnf copr list
sudo dnf copr disable owner/project

disable leaves the repository configured but inactive. sudo dnf copr remove owner/project deletes the configuration outright. Neither removes packages you installed from it, which then sit on your system with nothing behind them.

Before enabling one

Open its page on COPR and check three things: when it last built, which Fedora releases it builds for, and whether it follows Fedora branching. A project that does not follow branching stops producing builds for your release the moment you upgrade, and you are left holding packages that no repository will update.

Check first whether the package is already in Fedora or RPM Fusion. COPR is where you go when it is not.

Notable projects

Projects documented elsewhere on this site. Confirmed in September 2026; which Fedora releases each one builds for is on its COPR page.

Project What it provides Maintainer Follows branching
rhea/fedoratricks Fedora Tricks, a Bash tool that enables RPM Fusion, installs the multimedia stack and sets up the NVIDIA driver Rhea Gustavsson. The COPR description states the package is provided by the Fedora Discord server to its members Yes
@kernel-vanilla/fedora Upstream kernels built the way Fedora builds its own, from the series your release already uses. One of seven repositories covering different kernel series Thorsten Leemhuis, since 2012. None of Fedora's own kernel maintainers are involved Yes

Fedora Tricks covers what the tool does and how to use it.

The kernel repositories carry two conditions worth knowing before you enable one. Signing a vanilla kernel for standard UEFI Secure Boot is not currently possible, so you have to turn Secure Boot off; and moving a running system across to them needs --setopt=allow_vendor_change=1, because the kernel packages change vendor. Fedora's wiki page carries the current commands and the differences between the seven.

Sources