Building an RPM package from a source tarball

By Pierre Sarrazin
December 3rd, 2001

If you have not done so, you should take measures to avoid having to be root to build RPM packages. This is done by issuing the following command (under root), where someuser is the name of your unprivileged account: chown -fR someuser /usr/src/redhat

Then you can build a binary RPM package by downloading the source tarball and giving the following command (under someuser): rpm -tb the-source-tarbal.tar.gz

If you also want the rpm command to build the SRPM package, give the command the -ta option instead of -tb.

This assumes that the tarball contains the .spec file that determines how the RPM is to be built. That is the case for the tarballs I produce.