How to Create RPM for Your Own Script in CentOS/RedHat

RPM (RedHat Package Manager) is a package management system for RHEL based systems. You may have seen that all the packages in Redhat based systems have extension .rpm. This tutorial will help you to how to create RPM for your own script

I had created a script to take database backup, Today I have created an RPM file of that script, This is my first RPM created ever. Below are the steps which I follow to do it.

Step 1 – Install Required Packages

First of all, you need to install the required packages on your system to create rpm files.

$ yum install rpm-build rpmdevtools

Step 2 – Create Directory Structure

Go to users home directory, and create required directory structure using below command.

$ rpmdev-setuptree

Above command will create a directory structure like below.

$ ls -l rpmbuild

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Oct 25 03:09 BUILD
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Oct 25 03:09 RPMS
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Oct 25 03:09 SOURCES
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Oct 25 03:09 SPECS
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Oct 25 03:09 SRPMS

In case rpmdev-setuptree command failed to create structure, you can manually create it

$ mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS,tmp}

Step 3 – Create rpmmacro File

Now create ~/.rpmmacros file, with the following contents. Change the values of red highlighted names

~/.rpmmacros

%packager YOUR_NAME

%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild

%_smp_mflags %( \
    [ -z "$RPM_BUILD_NCPUS" ] \\\
        && RPM_BUILD_NCPUS="`/usr/bin/nproc 2>/dev/null || \\\
                             /usr/bin/getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN`"; \\\
    if [ "$RPM_BUILD_NCPUS" -gt 16 ]; then \\\
        echo "-j16"; \\\
    elif [ "$RPM_BUILD_NCPUS" -gt 3 ]; then \\\
        echo "-j$RPM_BUILD_NCPUS"; \\\
    else \\\
        echo "-j3"; \\\
    fi )

%__arch_install_post \
    [ "%{buildarch}" = "noarch" ] || QA_CHECK_RPATHS=1 ; \
    case "${QA_CHECK_RPATHS:-}" in [1yY]*) /usr/lib/rpm/check-rpaths ;; esac \
    /usr/lib/rpm/check-buildroot

Step 4 – Copy Files under SOURCES Directory

Copy all your files and scripts folder inside ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES directory, which we need to add in rpm file. For this tutorial, I have used all the files created in our tutorial Advance Bash Script for MySQL.

$ cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
$ ls -l mydumpadmin-1

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  125 Oct 25 03:54 credentials.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4693 Oct 25 03:54 mysql-dump.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1008 Oct 25 03:54 README.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3445 Oct 25 03:54 settings.conf

Create a tarball of your code.

$ tar czf mydumpadmin-1.0.tar.gz mydumpadmin-1

Step 5 – Create SPEC File

Create a spec file ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/mydumpadmin.spec using below content.

~/rpmbuild/SPECS/mydumpadmin.spec

Name:           mydumpadmin
Version:        1
Release:        0
Summary:        An Advance Bash Script for MySQL Database Backup

Group:          TecAdmin
BuildArch:      noarch
License:        GPL
URL:            https://github.com/tecrahul/mydumpadmin.git
Source0:        mydumpadmin-1.0.tar.gz

%description
Write some description about your package here

%prep
%setup -q
%build
%install
install -m 0755 -d $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/mydumpadmin
install -m 0600 credentials.txt $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/mydumpadmin/credentials.txt
install -m 0755 mysql-dump.sh $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/mydumpadmin/mysql-dump.sh
install -m 0644 README.md $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/mydumpadmin/README.md
install -m 0644 settings.conf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/mydumpadmin/settings.conf

%files
/etc/mydumpadmin
/etc/mydumpadmin/credentials.txt
/etc/mydumpadmin/mysql-dump.sh
/etc/mydumpadmin/README.md
/etc/mydumpadmin/settings.conf

%changelog
* Tue Oct 24 2017 Rahul Kumar  1.0.0
  - Initial rpm release

Change package name, script path, archive name, description etc, as per your requirement.

Step 6 – Build RPM

After completing above steps, lets build your rpm by executing following command.

$ cd ~/rpmbuild
$ rpmbuild -ba SPECS/mydumpadmin.spec

After successful built, a rpm file will created like ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/mydumpadmin-1-0.noarch.rpm

Install your rpm using the below command. After install check, the files are properly installed as defined location.

$ rpm -ivh mydumpadmin-1-0.noarch.rpm

Thank You for using this article. I hope above steps will help you to create your own rpm.