HEAVY WORK IN PROGRESS! COME BACK IN A COUPLE OF DAYS TO SEE DOC UPDATES

Why? Because plain rpmbuild may be an hassle (the system may became polluted by cross-project deps, and requires the same native system distro as the target package) and mock may be slow and sometimes painful to debug and configure.

docker-rpm-builder works on any host distributions that supports docker, and is currently tested to build 64 bit Centos 5, 6 and 7 RPM packages.

It's designed to be a very small and hackable wrapper to help in rpm building, and lets you build binary RPMs on the fly, without generating a source rpm. I hope to leverage docker capabilities to make the building fast.

Github homepage

My main purpose was to build packages from a CI system, so I wanted to have a directory as the source, not a source rpm which is a unnecessary byproduct.

This is still a bit annoying (we need a SourceX file) that requires a preprocessing, but I'm working on an auto-packing procedure.

I wanted to be able to build from whatever kind of RPM distribution I wanted, even though I'm especially focused on Redhat/Centos 5, 6 and 7; hence the script supports the base image. You can build your own, use one of mine, or build upon mine.

Must have docker installed and properly configured (see the install docs. The user running the build must be able to properly use docker - check your permissions.

You should have a vague idea of what Docker is and how it works, otherwise you might get puzzled.

Bash and perl should be installed on your system as well.

Just

git clone https://github.com/alanfranz/docker-rpm-builder.git

or download the latest release and unpack somewhere.

There's nothing else to install.

You should have a source directory that contains:

• the .spec file
• all the files which are set as SourceX and PatchX in the spec file (the source directory is something like an uncompressed source rpm);
• optionally, a yum.conf file (will be used while fetching deps and building the rpm in the docker guest - in this situation .repo files will be ignored)
• optionally, any number of .repo files (will be read along yum.conf, only if it wasn't overriden. Default contents of /etc/yum.repos.d are ignored)

And a build image, i.e. a Docker image tag with the distro where you would like to build such directory.

docker-build-binary-rpm-from-dir.sh IMAGETAG SRCDIR [ADDITIONAL_DOCKER_OPTIONS]

For building for 64 bit Centos 5-6-7 with EPEL there are some trusted builds on docker hub here, here and here

They're all based on the official Centos images.

Example for Centos 6:

docker-build-binary-rpm-from-dir.sh alanfranz/drb-epel-6-x86-64:latest FULL_PATH_TO_SRC_DIR

After build, the output will be in FULL_PATH_TO_SRC_DIR/RPMS

Or, using your favourite dns:

docker-build-binary-rpm-from-dir.sh alanfranz/drb-epel-6-x86-64:latest FULL_PATH_TO_SRC_DIR --dns=192.168.1.1

You can use whatever image you like with docker-rpm-builder, as long as it withstands some prerequisites:

• rpmbuild must exist in path
• /docker-rpm-build-root dir must exist in the base image, and hold the traditional SOURCES,RPMS,SRPMS,SPECS,BUILD directories.
• yum-builddep must exist in path and accept a .spec file as input
• commands must be able to complete without interaction - consider using a custom yum.conf with main->assumeyes=1 and be sure all public keys for packages are installed.

Take a look at https://github.com/alanfranz/docker-rpm-builder-configurations in order to understand what I mean.

Some of those are subject to change, I'm still thinking about what should I need from my base images.

• if you're used to mock, the build system is a bit different, mocks seems to employ different defaults and has different macros, sometimes a build working with mock may file with docker-rpm-builder. I'm investigating the issue. It's quite uncommon BTW.
• dns default to public ones, will add an option for private ones. Right now you can just add arbitrary docker options after IMAGETAG and SRCDIR

• spec files currently require source files to be specified; maybe it would be a good idea to create a .tar.gz from the source directory automatically in the host build script.
• use a main drb executable with different targets (see later)
• add target for building a srpm directly
• add target for building from a spectemplate instead of spec, e.g. be able to pass placeholders from outside to our rpm building script.
• document and extend hooks
• Support some way to cache build dependencies between builds for the same package (commit after run? commit after build-dep?)
• Support some way of forcing remote image tag update before building.
• Option for drop into interactive shell if build fails
• Smoke tests to see whether everything is properly built
• Better RPM package
• DEB package