Building an RPM package

INTRODUCTION

  In this post, I will teach you how to create an RPM package from a source code. This tutorial assumes that
you already have the tarballed source code ready to be unpacked.

  As an example in our previous post about mrepo, we have installed it from source and not by using RPM
so that is a perfect way to demomstrate the RPM creation.

1. Install the needed packages

yum install -y rpm-build rpmdevtools
# rpm-build is required which contains "rpmbuild" command
# rpmdevtools is optional which is helpful in creating the directory tree

2. Create the directory tree

rpmdev-setuptree
# that command will create /root/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}

3. Copy the tarballed source file to SOURCES

cp mrepo-0.8.7.tar.bz2 /root/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

4. Copy the spec file to SPECS. It is usually included inside the tarball so unpack the tarball to /tmp first then
get the spec file from there.

tar xvf mrepo-0.8.7.tar.bz2 -C /tmp
cp /tmp/mrepo-0.8.7/mrepo.spec /root/rpmbuild/SPECS

INFO: A spec file describes the software and contains instructions on how to install the software. Creation
and detailed discussion of a spec file is not covered in this post but I might create one soon.

5. Now create the RPMs (src and binary)

rpmbuild -ba /root/rpmbuild/SPECS/mrepo.spec
# that command will create the following files
#  /root/rpmbuilds/RPMS/noarch/mrepo-0.8.7-1.noarch.rpm -> the actual rpm you can install
#  /root/rombuild/SRPMS/mrepo-0.8.7-1.src.rpm -> contains the original source code and the spec file

6. Validate by installing the rpm

rpm -ivh /root/rpmbuild/noarch/mrepo-0.8.7-1.noarch.rpm

SOURCES

Other tutorials:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/RPM-HOWTO/build.html
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2015/02/rpm-build-package-example/