Hello,

I'm trying to package Apache Tomcat binary tarball into a RPM package on CentOS 5.5. The idea is to package the tarball, extract it into /usr/local/, create a tomcat user, change permission on the /usr/local/tomcat install dir, copy the init startup script to /etc/init.d/

Since it's a binary/pre-compiled package, I don't need to compile the source codes.

Does anyone know how I can build such binary package in RPM?


Thank you

First of all the tomcat package already is available for Centos (tomcat5-5.5.23-0jpp.11.el5_5) and I'm pretty sure it already creates a user account and a SysV init script. If you need to relocate it to /usr/local then you should 'yum --downloadonly' the package and 'rpm --relocate /usr=/usr/local' the package. If you intend to build a binary package doing things your way regardless then the result should never leave your LAN and never be distributed publicly as the package contents can not be verified. Building a binary RPM you would do just like you would build any other package: a tarball in the %{SOURCES} directory, a .spec file in the %{SPECS} directory and then just 'rpmbuild -bb' your .spec file: see http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Rpm, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/D...gPackagesGuide, http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Docs#PackagerDocumentation, rpm5.org/docs/rpm-guide.pdf and rpm5.org/docs/max-rpm.pdf.

Thanks for your reply unSpawn,

Yes my intention is to build RPM package just for our own internal use only. I understand that the recommended way to build RPMs is to package the "pristine" source codes to compile so that any customizations in the rpm package won't compromise the original source codes during installation. Patching and upgrading the package will also be easier. I took a peek at the .spec file of the Apache Tomcat RPM package that JPackage builds from Apache Tomcat original source codes and it seems complex.

For what I want to do, I had to exclude the %prep and the %build section in the .spec file, so that it does not attempt the compile any files. I added some procedural tasks in the .spec file and was able to build my RPM.


Thanks again.