Welcome to RPM Packaging Guide’s documentation!

Attention

This guide has been permanently moved to https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/ where you can find the latest version.

So You Want To Be An RPM Packager?

So you want to be an RPM Packager (or you at least need to know how to package RPMs because of your dayjob or otherwise)?

Well hopefully this guide will prove to be helpful.

Below you will find information about RPMs, source code and all sorts of things in between. If you are familiar with what “Source Code” is and how it gets compiled or “built” into software then feel free to skip the General Topics and Background section and move right on into the RPM Guide. More advanced topics and items otherwise considered out of scope of getting you on the path to packaging software will be held in the Appendix. However, I hope all sections of this guide do prove useful in some capacity.

This guide is meant to be used however the reader feels they would best like to use it. The sections are arranged such that the reader may start from the beginning and go all the way through and the flow of topics should make sense with each topic building upon the previous ones. However, if you as the reader feel you are comfortable with a topic or would just like to use the guide as reference material please feel free to skip sections or jump around as you please. The goal here is to be useful to someone with little to no background in software development or packaging so some topics will likely seem oddly introductory for such a guide, but don’t worry that’s by design and you can skip past those if you like.

Document Conventions

Code and command line out put will be placed into a block similar to the following:

This is a block! We can do all sorts of cool code and command line stuff
here!

Look, more lines!
$ echo "Here's some command line output!"
Here's some command line output!
#!/usr/bin/env python

def code_example:
    print("And here's some code with syntax highlighting and everything!")

code_example()

Topics of interest or vocabulary terms will either be referred to as URLs to their respective documentation/website, as a bold item, or in italics. The first encounter of the term should be a reference to its respective documentation.

Command line utilities, commands, or things otherwise found in code that are used through out paragraphs will be written in a monospace font.

Prerequisites

In order to perform the following examples you will need a few packages installed on your system:

Note

The inclusion of some of the packages below are not actually necessary because they are a part of the default installation of Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS but are listed explicitly for perspective of exactly the tools used within this document.

$ dnf install gcc rpm-build rpm-devel rpmlint make python bash coreutils diffutils
patch rpmdevtools
  • For RHEL or CentOS (this guide assumes version 7.x of either):
$ yum install gcc rpm-build rpm-devel rpmlint make python bash coreutils diffutils
patch rpmdevtools

Beyond these preliminary packages you will also need a text editor of your choosing. We will not be discussing or recommending text editors in this document and we trust that everyone has at least one they are comfortable with at their disposal.

Contributing to this guide

If you are currently a RPM Packager and would like to contribute either by way of feedback or pull request, please do! Both forms of contribution are greatly appreciate and certainly welcome. Feel free to file an issue ticket with feedback, submit a pull request on GitHub, or both!

Thank you for your time.