Effing Package Management! Alternatives

Effing Package Management!

The packaging formats used by different distributions of Linux can be a pain point for software developers wishing to release their projects in an easily consumable way. Debian and Ubuntu rely on .deb packages, while Fedora and RedHat both use .rpm style packaging systems. These are incompatible and the tools needed to create them can be rather difficult to work with for those unfamiliar with the eccentricities of each.

While package maintainers for distributions do the heavy lifting for packages included in the official repositories, if you plan on releasing software for these distributions on your own site or need to create packages for your organization, you will usually want to provide packages yourself. This traditionally involved learning the workings of at least a few tools for each of the packaging families.

To minimize the complications of this process, a tool called fpm was created. Using fpm, you can easily create both .deb and .rpm files without having to know any of the commands of the packaging tools that it leverages. In this guide, we will discuss how to use fpm to create packages of different formats using an Ubuntu 14.04 server.