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Chris Adams
Asked: 2011-02-17 02:48:46 +0800 CST

What have been the most useful resources for you when learning to make RPM's?

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I'm in the position of needing to make a few RPMs at work, which is something fairly new to me.

I'd really love to hear which docs, tutorials. or presos have been useful for you for understanding:

a) how to make them well without making noobish mistakes

b) any other handy tricks that you would otherwise miss if you didn't spend a day poring over the man pages.

What's been the most helpful for you?

I'm coming from a developer background, so I'm comfortable with making and compiling software manually, and I've fiddled around with making formula for homebrew but rpm is a new, powerful and shiny tool to me.

linux rpm packaging

7 Answers

  1. If you want a guide that cuts through the noise, I recommend these

    Creating RPM's for Linux

    JBoss 5.1.0A RPM Spec

    But you should keep the Fedora guide bookmarked, as you'll be coming back to it.

    I also found Maximum RPM: Taking the Red Hat Package Manager to the Limit very useful as a reference.

    Tip: If you're building RPMs on Centos, this link gets your build environment set up nice and quickly:

    Set Up an RPM Build Environment under CentOS

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  2. The thing that helped me the most was looking at source rpms. Install the source rpm for the smallest app you can find, and look at its spec file.

    Fedora packaging guide was useful too, but very heavy on doing things right, to the point doing it at all got a little lost in the noise.

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  3. I keep hearing good things about this one... runs

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  4. If you just need to package a bunch of files, without doing complicated stuff with deps and scripts you can give a try to fpm. Quick and painless.

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  5. So far the most useful outline I've found of the build process is on the IBM DeveloperWorks site:

    http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-rpm1/

    This preso on slideshare has been useful for skimming too:

    http://www.slideshare.net/lovelace/rpm-packaging-101-old

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  7. Look at the output of the compile, and make sure you bundle up all the files that 'make install' lays down in your spec file.

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