RPM Tutorial

Put something similiar to the following in a file called .rpmmacros in your home directory:

%packager      T.R. Fullhart <kayos@genetikayos.com>
%vendor        Name of your project

%_topdir       /home/kayos/rpm

The .rpmmacros file is used by rpmbuild to provide defaults. You may find references to the .rpmrc file, but it has been deprecated in favor of this file.

The first 2 lines will add information to each RPM package you build so others can know who made the package

The last line is so you can build packages as a user. It's not good practice to build packages as root.

In order to build packages as a user, you will also need to create build directories. By default, rpm will expect to find and use the following directories:

%{_topdir}/BUILD
%{_topdir}/RPMS
%{_topdir}/RPMS/i386
%{_topdir}/SOURCES
%{_topdir}/SPECS
%{_topdir}/SRPMS

You will need to manually create the directories. For example, on my machine I use the example .rpmmacros file above. I set %_topdir to /home/kayos/rpm, so I had to run the following commands to create the build tree:

mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/BUILD
mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/RPMS
mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/RPMS/i386
mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/SOURCES
mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/SPECS
mkdir /home/kayos/rpm/SRPMS

Making an RPM for software that comes as a tarball and uses the ./configure and make conventions is easy.

Put your .spec file in the SPECS subdirectory that you created in the previous section. Put your tarball in the SOURCES subdirectory.

I'll cover the major sections in the .spec file, but the key sections that actually build the software in an RPM are the %build, %install, and %files sections.

The %prep section is where you unpack your sources so you can do the build. In the sample below, I use the %setup macro. The %setup macro uses the Source: line at the top of the file to find a file in the SOURCES directory. Then it unpacks the file into the BUILD directory. The %setup macro is smart, it knows how to unpack .tar, .zip, .bz2, and .gz files.

In the %build section, you usually want to run something like ./configure and then make.

In the sample I have below, it checks to see if the configure script exists, and if it doesn't, it runs ./autogen.sh, a shell script that was included in the package that, in turn, runs Autoconf to regenerate the configure script.

Also notice that I passed --prefix=%{_prefix} to ./configure. That is so you can adjust whether you want the package installed in /usr, /opt, or /usr/local by changing the Prefix: line near the top of the .spec file.

In the %install script, you usually just run something like 'make install', but you have to somehow make it install to the directory pointed to by $RPM_BUILD_ROOT, that's where RPM will look for the files that it puts into the RPM package. In the sample I have below, I pass DESTDIR=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT. For Makefiles that are generated by Automake, DESTDIR overrides where it installs to.

Sample .spec file

%define name skstream
%define version 0.2.2
%define release 1

Summary: Portable C++ classes for IP(sockets) applications.
Name: %{name}
Version: %{version}
Release: %{release}
Source: ftp://ftp.worldforge.org/pub/worldforge/libs/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Vendor: The WorldForge Project
URL: http://www.worldforge.org/
License: LGPL
Group: System Environment/Libraries
Prefix: %{_prefix}

%description
This library contains C++ utility classes for using IP(sockets).

%package devel
Summary: Libraries, includes to develop applications with %{name}.
Group: Development/Libraries
Requires: %{name} = %{version}

%description devel
The %{name}-devel package contains the header files and static libraries for
building applications which use %{name}.

%prep
%setup -q

%build
if [ -x ./configure ]; then
  CFLAGS="$RPM_OPT_FLAGS" ./configure --prefix=%{_prefix}
else
  CFLAGS="$RPM_OPT_FLAGS" ./autogen.sh --prefix=%{_prefix}
fi
make

%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
make DESTDIR=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT install

%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

%post -p /sbin/ldconfig

%postun -p /sbin/ldconfig

%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
%doc AUTHORS ChangeLog COPYING INSTALL NEWS README TODO
%{_prefix}/lib/lib*.so.*

%files devel
%defattr(-,root,root)
%doc AUTHORS ChangeLog COPYING INSTALL NEWS README TODO
%{_prefix}/bin/*-config
%{_prefix}/lib/lib*.a
%{_prefix}/lib/lib*.so
%{_prefix}/include/*
%{_prefix}/share/aclocal/*

%changelog
* Thu Mar 7 2002 T.R. Fullhart <kayos@kayos.org>
- First draft of the spec file

GNU Autotools is being widely adopted by open-source software, including the WorldForge Project, so that makes building RPM packages very easy. Basically, it's just like doing it from a tarball, but you can use autoconf to fill in some of the blanks in your .spec file so you don't have to maintain it very much between releases.

Sample .spec.in file

Change configure.in.

Rerun ./autogen.sh.

Run ./configure

Make a dist, make dist.

rpmlint homepage

The configuration file of rpmlint is actually a small Python program to set some variables. You won't need to learn Python to configure rpmlint, it's fairly easy. You can find a bit of documentation with rpmlint, but here is what my ~/.rpmlintrc file looks like:

from Config import *

setOption("Vendor", "The WorldForge Project")
setOption("Packager", "T.R. Fullhart <kayos@kayos.org>")
setOption("Distribution", None)

rpmlint package.i386.rpm