I'm trying to package Apache Tomcat binary tarball into an RPM package for CentOS 6.4. The idea is to easily install tomcat via yum from my private yum repo. I want the rpm to untar the tarball to a particular directory (/usr/local/tomcat); recursively chown said directory and finally install an init script. Yes, I realize EPEL offers a tomcat.noarch rpm, but it's not the latest version of tomcat.

This should be easy, but I guess what I'm trying to achieve is so outside the box of best practices I can't find any tutorials.

Once I have the rpm I'll be able to deploy tomcat via Puppet. Good times. Good times.

Thanks!

-rubanek

You would normally build an rpm from a source tarball, not a binary tarball.
If you have a local copy of the source in an svn or hg repository, you would normally build a source package which would then be used to build the rpm, using rpmbuild and a spec file to detail how to build and package the files.
If you don't have a local svn or hg repository, then you can get the tomcat-src.rpm, and use rpmbuild to rebuild an rpm.
The src.rpm usually contains a source archive (tar.gz, or similar) plus the spec file, and possibly patches to fix any problems.
Have a read about 'rpmbuild', to get more detail.

Cheers,
Terry

yes, rpmbuild is used to create rpm packages. You do not really need to rebuild from source, it is only a possibility, you can skip that step. The permissions are also set by the tool you do not need to implement that yourself.
http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Docs#PackagerDocumentation

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Building rpm from files : Actually quite simlple.

Create a spec file with the right file list, and run $ rpmbuild -bb file.spec
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Attached Files

test.spec.txt (235 Bytes, 306 views)

As above.

Make sure you disable jar re-packing in your spec file.

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