Building Custom Source and Binary RPMs

By now, you should understand where you should modify a source RPM spec file to change compile-time options in the %build section. However, there's much more to building customized RPMs. Once you have modified the spec file, you need to tell RPM to build a new binary and source RPM.

You can build an RPM using the rpmbuild command, with the build switch, -b. By itself, rpmbuild -b calls the scripts specified in the %prep, %build, and %install section of the spec file. Normally, you'll modify the -b with a, which makes RPM go through the build process, step by step. The rpmbuild command is directed at a spec file. For example, this command

# rpmbuild -ba vsftpd.spec

directs RPM to create binary and source RPMs from this spec file. Alternatively, if you just want the binary RPM, use the following commands:

# rpmbuild -bb vsftpd.spec

Naturally, the RPMs are created in the RPMs/ and SRPMS/ subdirectories.