Is there an easy procedure to build an RPM.If so Please explain or provide the link.........
My requirement is very simple ..
I have two other RPMs which should be combined into one single RPM....
Please explain the process....
Thanks in advance..........
Building an RPM itself is rather easy, you just need to run
rpmbuild -ba <mypackage.spec>
The more complex task is creating the .spec file, which controls how the rpm itself is built. A good explanation is the book Maximum RPM, which is available on the rpm homepage. Creating a .spec file is handled here. From my own experience building a .spec file is something that's not easy -- but not too complicated either unless you want to make special things. The standard ./configure && make && make install is usually not too complicated.
Not sure what the problem is; if you've already got two RPMs, why do you need to make them into 1 rpm? Why not just use a shell script to install them both at the same time?
The RPM command will take multiple arguments, so for example:
rpm -ivh one.rpm two.rpm three.rpm
Will install one, followed by two, followed by three.
Otherwise, from what I know, you're going to have to build the packages first, and then build them into an RPM, at which point you will have a custom RPM that will have to be manually updated every time one of the component packages changes. Yuck.
Basic guide for RPM creation is available at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package
A very good and complete guide for RPM creation (by Fedora community) is available at link: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/RPM_Guide/
It is is wonderful.
BTW, for straight answer of your question, you might want to add two packages as a subpackage of another package. For that there are some specific entries in RPM spec file.
You need to create only one SPEC file for all three packages
Related
Good afternoon,
I am currently building an RPM that has some requirements I have not found answers to on the web. I have narrowed this down to a single question.
Normally when I run an install from command line, one of the steps has me run the following command yum groupinstall "Compatibility libraries" which installs 32-bit compatibility libraries on my 64-bit desktop. I am wondering if there is a way to accomplish this in the Requires: field of my RPM-spec file, as I have only found a way to require very specific RPM's for dependencies?
I could always add in the 10-15 individual packages that get installed with yum groupinstall "Compatibility Libraries", but I was hoping there was a better option.
Description of RPM:
My RPM is very basic in nature. It will untar multiple tar files into various locations, overwrite files throughout the main install directory, install compatibility libraries, and then proceed to startup a service.
If anyone needs more information to what I am trying to accomplish please let me know. Thank you.
You can only require specific packages, not groups, in your Requires: lines. You should absolutely not run yum in your %post script, because then (a) you are then hiding your dependencies, and nobody likes to see things get installed that they didn't expect, and (b) you will probably end up getting stuck because yum in %post would need to wait for the existing yum process to exit.
For library Requires:, the rpm build process will generally figure things out for you. You still need to manually specify the appropriate BuildRequires: dependencies, which are things that are required to build the package.
If you want to update your question with more details (e.g., a link to the spec file and a description of what you're trying to do, if it's not obvious from the spec), maybe we can come up with better solutions.
I am a newbie in generating a rpm package. I am trying to create a rpm file which require so many modules such as php, mysql, Apache, etc.
I have tried a lot but as I found that there is .spec file, makefile, configure file to build rpm. In my case, there is no such file as I just want to install some third party package all in one rpm file.
I am really stuck and don't getting a proper way to do this stuff. Please help me I am very thankful to you.
I have visited some links, https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rpm_building_howto.pdf
http://www.logiqwest.com/TechnicalPapers/rpmScriptInstall.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/creating-an-rpm-without-source-734490/
No one providing a better solution to fulfill my motto.
In simple, I just want to integrate all my steps in rpm package which can be install using script.
Please suggest a proper way or let me know Is it possible or not?
You would tar up your source to be the main Source and have your RPM Require the various servers you need. In the %install stanza, you would copy all your files to the staging area equivalent of your destination.
Create a appropriate spec file. This describes rpm for developer.
You should pay attention to %require. This is where you specify the dependencies like php, mysql. You don't have to bundle every package in your rpm. rpm is smart to figure out what package are being needed.
Chapter 14 of the link describes this.
The resulting rpm can be installed using rpm install pkg_name.rpm but if you want yum install pkg_name, then you need set up a yum repo.
I'm looking into trying to find an easy way to manage packages compiled from source so that when it comes time to upgrade, I'm not in a huge mess trying to uninstall/install the new package.
I found a utility called CheckInstall, but it seems to be quite old, and I was wondering if this a reliable solution before I begin using it?
http://www.asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/
Also would simply likely to know any other methods/utilities that you use to handle these installations from source?
Whatever you do, make sure that you eventually go through your distribution's package management system (e.g. rpm for Fedora/Mandriva/RH/SuSE, dpkg for Debian/Ubuntu etc). Otherwise your package manager will not know anything about the packages you installed by hand and you will have unsatisfied dependencies at best, or the mother of all messes at worst.
If you don't have a package manager, then get one and stick with it!
I would suggest that you learn to make your own packages. You can start by having a look at the source packages of your distribution. In fact, if all you want to do is upgrade to version 1.2.3 of MyPackage, your distribution's source package for 1.2.2 can usually be adapted with a simple version change (unless there are patches, but that's another story...).
Unless you want distribution-quality packages (e.g. split library/application/debugging packages, multiple-architecture support etc) it is usually easy to convert your typical configure & make & make install scenario into a proper source package. If you can convince your package to install into a directory rather than /, you are usually done.
As for checkinstall, I have used it in the past, and it worked for a couple of simple packages, but I did not like the fact that it actually let the package install itself onto my system before creating the rpm/deb package. It just tracked which files got installed so that it would package them, which did not protect against unwelcome changes. Oh, and it needed root prilileges to work, which is another main sticking point for me. And lets not go into what happens with statically linked core utilities...
Most tools of the kind seem to work that way, so I simply learnt to build my own packages The Right Way (TM) and let checkinstall and friends mess around elsewhere. If you are still interested, however, there is a list of similar programs here:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/automating-destdir.html
PS: BTW checkinstall was updated at the end of 2009, which probably means that it's still adequately current.
EDIT:
In my opinion, the easiest way to perform an upgrade to the latest version of a package if it is not readily available in a repository is to alter the source package of the latest version in your distribution. E.g. for Centos the source packages for the latest version are here:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.5/os/SRPMS/
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.5/updates/SRPMS/
...
If you want to upgrade e.g. php, you get the latest SRPM for your distrbution e.g. php-5.1.6-27.el5.src.rpm. Then you do:
rpm -hiv php-5.1.6-27.el5.src.rpm
which installs the source package (just the sources - it does not compile anything). Then you go to the rpm build directory (on my mandriva system its /usr/src/rpm), you copy the latest php source tarball to the SOURCES subdirectory and you make sure it's compressed in the same way as the tarball that just got installed there. Afterwards you edit the php.spec file in the SPECS directory to change the package version and build the binary package with something like:
rpmbuild -ba php.spec
In many cases that's all it will take for a new package. In others things might get a bit more complicated - if there are patches or if there are some major changes in the package you might have to do more.
I suggest you read up on the rpm and rpmbuild commands (their manpages are quite good, in a bit extensive) and check up the documentation on writing spec files. Even if you decide to rely on official backport repositories, it is useful to know how to build your own packages. See also:
http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Docs
EDIT 2:
If you are already installing packages from source, using rpm will actually simplify the building process in the long term, apart from maintaining the integrity of your system. The reason for this is that you won't have to remember the quirks of each package on your own ("oooh, right, now I remember, foo needs me to add -lbar to its CFLAGS"), as the build process will be in the .spec file, which you could imagine as a somewhat structured build script.
As far as upgrading goes, if you already have a .spec file for a previous version of the package, there are two main issues that you may encounter, but both exist whether you use rpm to build your package or not:
A patch that was applied to the previous version by the distribution does not apply any more. In many cases the patch has already been applied to the upstream package, so you can simply drop it. In others you may have to edit it - or I suppose if you deem it unimportant you can drop it too.
The package changed in some major way which affected e.g. the layout of the files it installs. You do read the release notes notes for each new version, don't you?
Other than these two issues, upgrading often boils down to just changing a version number in the spec file and running rpmbuild - even easier than installing from a tarball.
I would suggest that you have a look at the tutorials or at the source package for some simple piece of software such as:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.5/os/SRPMS/ipv6calc-0.61-1.src.rpm
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.5/os/SRPMS/libevent-1.4.13-1.src.rpm
If you have experience in buildling packages from a tarball, using rpm to build software is not much of a leap really. It will never be as simple as installing a premade binary package, however.
I use checkinstall on Debian. It should not be so different on CentOS. I use it like that:
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall make install # fakeroot in place of sudo works usally for more security
# install the package generated
Is it possible to paqckage multiple rpms into one file. I have got two bundles one of which requires that the other be installed. I would like to create a single installable out of them in such a way that this installer will first invoke pkg 1 and then install pkg 2. Is this possible? What about deb packages? Sorry if it a basic question. I have not worked with installers on Linux before. I have created Windows installers. There you can create two merge modules (.msm) and package them into a standalone installer (.msi) and specify the order of execution. I am looking for similar functionality on Linux.
EDIT: I think the question was not clear enough. Let me try to rephrase it. I have a bunch of runtime libraries which is currently shipped as a standalone installer. Another team develops products which use these libraries at runtime. I now want to provide the libraries to the product team in some form (sub-package) which they can include with their installer and configure their installer to install my sub-package first. Both packages should be available locally to the end user. They are not available on any repository and cannot be pulled down from the net at install time.
Try packaging them into a self extraction bash script. You won't have to modify or aggregate the libraries and rpms together. This should yield an executable file that can be included in another installation process. The last step of the extraction should be to call "rpm -i" with the rpm files as arguments.
Reference on building a self extracting bash script:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005818
First : you don't have to repackage anything, especially not if your application uses some external libraries. You just have to mention in your recipe that your RPM (or DEB) depends on the other one. Both apt-get (for deb) and yum (for rpm) will check these dependencies and install them if needed.
See :
http://rpm5.org/docs/api/dependencies.html (rpm) and http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/How-to-make-deb-packages/ (deb)
(These were just the first ones I found, you can find better resources out there :p).
It seems that the RPM logic is quite different from what I know already and I am having some issues understanding the "RPM logic". For my work, I have to create a documentation on "How-to create a RPM package on Red Hat 5".
I'm used to Debian and it's derivatives (Ubuntu, and so on) and thus to Debian packages (aka. .deb files).
From what I read, it seems that ones need to be root to create a RPM package. While I understand why root could be required to install a package, I still don't understand why elevated privileges should be needed just to create one.
If I try to create a RPM package as a user, changing the buildroot it fails on the %installstep because I don't have permission to write files into /usr/bin. Fair enough but... why does it want to copy my files into /usr/bin at this step?! I just want to create the package, not install it!
I'm sure I'm missing something here. Is there anyone who could give me at least a basic understanding of how rpmbuild works and why?
Will this do?
You don't need to be root to build RPM packages. I recommend you to read this two part article to get you started.
The official Maximum RPM book also has a chapter on Having RPM Use a Different Build Area, which allows non-root users to build RPMs.