I built my first RPM package today. Well ... / 2010-09-17

I built my first RPM package today. Well ok, I adjusted the specfile and patchfile of an existing RPM package. But now it does what I want and I understood what I was doing.

I needed to write installation instructions for adding servers to zabbix. And the whole configure ; make ; make install ; fix this, fix that, fix ... thing is not very co-worker friendly.

So I did a bit of searching and found Andrew Farley's rpms from a forum post on the zabbix forums: CentOS 5 (and RHEL) RPMs for Zabbix 1.8. I changed a few things, removed the build of server and proxy (not needed in my setup) and started doing runs with rpmbuild. After a few tries (and lots of time for tea waiting for the complete rebuild every time) I had a working setup which would deploy to a server in minutes. A simple 'how to configure and activate' was added in the instructions. And now it saves us work. On to the next project!

In general, having to document something, writing down exactly how something fits together is a great way to start thinking about it, and sometimes finding a lot of room for improving things.