fpm-cookery - For building software

A tool for building software packages with fpm.

The fpm project is really nice for building operating system packages like .deb and .rpm. But it only helps you to create the packages and doesn't help you with actually building the software.

fpm-cookery provides an infrastructure to automatically build software based on recipes. It's heavily inspired and borrows code from the great homebrew and brew2deb projects. The OpenBSD Ports System is probably another source of inspiration since I've been working with that for quite some time

It is using fpm to create the actual packages.

Why?

Building operating system packages for Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat using the official process and tools is pretty annoying if you just want some custom packages. Jordan's fpm removes the biggest hurdle by providing a simple command line tool to build packages for different operating systems.

Before you can use fpm to create the package, you have to build the software, though. In the past I've been using some shell scripts and Makefiles to automate this task.

Then I discovered Aman's brew2deb which is actually homebrew with some modifications to make it work on Linux. (only Debian/Ubuntu for now) Since homebrew was designed for Mac OS X, I thought it would be nice to have a "native" Linux tool for the job.

fpm-cookery is my attempt to build such a tool.

Features

• Download of the source archives. (via curl(1))
• Recipes to describe and execute the software build. (e.g. configure, make, make install)
• Sandboxed builds.
• Package creation via fpm.
• Standalone recipe trees/books/you name it. No need to put the recipes into the fpm-cookery source tree.
• Can build Omnibus style packages (allows you to embed many builds into the same package - used by the Opscode folks to build an embedded Ruby and the gems for Chef into a single package; also the Sensu guys do something similar.)

Upcoming Features

• Recipe validation.
• More source types. (hg, bzr, ...)
• Progress output and logging.
• Extend recipe features and build/install helpers.
• Configuration file. (for stuff like vendor and maintainer)
• Options for the fpm-cook command.
• Manpage for the fpm-cook command.

Getting Started

fpm-cookery is available as a gem.

$ gem install fpm-cookery

Create a recipe directory or change into an existing recipe tree.

$ cd recipes/redis
$ fpm-cook clean
$ fpm-cook

You can install the development dependencies with bundle install and run the included test suite with rake test.

Status

It can build the included recipes/redis/recipe.rb and recipes/nodejs/recipe.rb recipes. (both imported from brew2deb) See CAVEATS for an incomplete list of missing stuff.

Example Recipe

The following is an example recipe. I have some more in my recipe collection over here.

    class Redis < FPM::Cookery::Recipe
      homepage 'http://redis.io'
      source   'http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.2.5.tar.gz'
      md5      'fe6395bbd2cadc45f4f20f6bbe05ed09'

      name     'redis-server'
      version  '2.2.5'
      revision '1'

      description 'An advanced key-value store.'

      conflicts 'redis-server'

      config_files '/etc/redis/redis.conf'

      def build
        make

        inline_replace 'redis.conf' do |s|
          s.gsub! 'daemonize no', 'daemonize yes'
        end
      end

      def install
        # make :install, 'DESTDIR' => destdir

        var('lib/redis').mkdir

        %w(run log/redis).each {|p| var(p).mkdir }

        bin.install ['src/redis-server', 'src/redis-cli']

        etc('redis').install 'redis.conf'
        etc('init.d').install 'redis-server.init.d' => 'redis-server'
      end
    end

CAVEATS

• At the moment, there's only a small subset of the homebrew DSL implemented.
• No recipe documentation and API documentation yet.
• No recipe validation yet.
• No dependency validation yet.
• Pretty new and not well tested.

Credits

fpm-cookery borrows lots of ideas and also code from the homebrew and brew2deb projects.

License

The BSD 2-Clause License - See LICENSE for details

How To Contribute

• I'd love to hear if you like it, hate it, use it and if you have suggestions and/or problems.
• Send pull requests. (hugs for topic branches and tests)
• Have fun!