2.3. Building a Package

⁠2.3. Building a Package

This section shows how to build your RPM package with the rpmbuild command.

Run rpmbuild as a non-root user

It is highly recommended to always run the rpmbuild command as a non-root, normal, user. If you build a package as the root user, possible mistakes in the spec file, for example in the %install section, can cause damage to your system.

⁠2.3.1. Building an Example Package: eject

These steps show an example of building a package with a previously created spec file of the eject utility. For installation, eject only requires a minimum set of package dependencies. This makes it a good project to examine for package building.

Before starting with the package building process itself, make sure that you have created a non-root buildroot on your system.

⁠

Procedure 2.3. Building an example package: eject

Download the source code archive for eject and place it in the ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/ directory.
Obtain the spec file for eject and place it in the ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ directory.
In a shell prompt, change to the ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ directory and run the rpmbuild command:
```
 cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS 
```
```
 rpmbuild -ba eject.spec 
```
If you end up with an error message similar to the following one, it means that you have not installed the package dependencies required by the eject package:
```
error: Failed build dependencies:
libtool is needed by eject-2.1.5-0.1.x86_64
```
1. You can use yum to install the needed files or packages. Run the following command to install the required libtool package:
```
 yum install -y libtool 
```
In case you have received a build error related to the %install section, you may want to skip earlier stages of the build process with the --short-circuit option and restart the build process at the %install stage:
```
 rpmbuild -bi --short-circuit eject.spec 
```
Once you get a clean build, the last line of the rpmbuild output will be as follows:
```
+ exit 0
```
After a successful build with the rpmbuild -ba eject.spec command, the binary package will be placed in a subdirectory of the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/ directory and the source package will be placed in ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/.
If you just want to create a source package (.src.rpm), run the following command:
```
 rpmbuild -bs eject.spec  
```
This will create the source package in the ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/ directory, or recreate it if it has been previously created.