In several occasions I had to build RPM packages for installing software. In the past I mostly did it with a Maven build using the RPM Maven Plugin
.
The process is simple: At the end of your build you gather up all resources, try to understand the mapping configuration, bang your head a few times in order to figure out way to work with -SNAPSHOT versions and that’s it. In the end you have a few RPM files.
The only problem is, that the plugin actually creates a spec
file and runs the rpmbuild command line tool. Which is, of course, only available on an RPM like system. Fortunately Debian/Ubuntu based distributions, although they use something different, provide at least the rpmbuild tool.
On Windows or Mac OS the situation looks different. Adding rpmbuild to Windows can be quite a task. Still the question remains, why this is necessary since Java can run on all platforms.
So time to write a Maven plugin which does not the rpmbuild tool, but create RPM packages native in Java:
de.dentrassi.maven:rpm is a Maven Plugin which does create RPM packages using plain Java as a Maven Plugin. The process is simply and fast and does not require additional command line tool. The plugin is open source and the source code is available on GitHub ctron/rpm-builder.