Building Packages From Source With CheckInstall

Most Linux distributions today use some form of package management to deal with dependencies and to make upgrades and installation of software easier for the ever-overworked systems administrators. The most popular formats for packages are Red Hat based RPM files, Debian DEB files, Slackware TGZ files and the build-from-source Ports-like method of distributions such as Gentoo, Lunar Linux, et. al. However, there exist many apps and tools which are only released as source tarballs using the ubiquitous "configure; make; make install" or binary only tarballs.

If you want to use these tarballs but also manage them in the same way you do the rest of your OS you had to deal with jumping through the hoops required of the package management systems used by your distribution. That is until now, thanks to a wonderful little utility called CheckInstall.

Developed and maintained by Felipe Eduardo Sánchez Díaz Durán, CheckInstall consists of a collection of shell scripts and a library. With it, you can build an .rpm or .deb or .tgz package that will install using the associated packaging tools.

The easiest way to use CheckInstall is in place of the "make install" portion of a typical build process. Executing CheckInstall will run "make install" using the installwatch script. This script keeps track of the "make install", then feeds the results info to CheckInstall in order for it to build the package. These tools allow for the ability to build and manage any self-made packages as easily as any binary package you might download from the net. They give you great flexibility in how you build the package, and even how dependencies are managed.

Let's see what a typical run of CheckInstall might look like:

Please choose the packaging method you want to use.
Slackware [S], RPM [R] or Debian [D]? R

This package will be built according to these values:
1 -  Summary: [ libcgi 1.0 ]
2 -  Name:    [ libcgi ]
3 -  Version: [ 1.0 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ Applications/System ]
7 -  Architecture: [ i386 ]
8 -  Source location: [ libcgi-1.0 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Provides: [  ]
11 - Requires: [  ]

Enter a number to change any of them or press ENTER to continue:

As you can see, CheckIinstall allows you to edit all of the basic fields that describe a package, in this case an RPM package. The fields are pre-filled with reasonable data, however you can change any of the fields to new values. It's likely that you'll want to change #6 and possibly #5, #7 and #11. You also have the ability to run pre and post install scripts as well as pre and post removal scripts.

There are a few things you need to do to get setup for building a package with CheckInstall. First, you'll need a file named "description-pak" which should contain the program name and version, followed by a description. You should also create a subdirectory named "doc-pak" in which you can put the text files like README, ChangeLog and the like.

One very nice thing you can do with CheckInstall is tell it to run a specific program or script for the software installation. For example, you might find a very good program that is only released in binary format with a script called "setup" that's used to install it. You can build a package for it by telling CheckInstall to use the "setup" script for the install portion.

An example command might look like this:

$ checkinstall -R --install=yes ./setup

This command line will build and install an RPM but using the setup script to do the actual installing. By default CheckInstall builds the package but doesn't install it. The "--install=yes" option causes CheckInstall to perform the package installation. You can also use the switch "--rpmu" to do an upgrade of a package that is already installed.

Once a package is made using CheckInstall it is virtually impossible to tell it apart from a package built with a hand-generated spec file. There's even a nice feature for saving the spec file that checkinstall makes in order to build the packages. This generated spec file is normally deleted after the package has been built but if you pass the switch "--delspec=no", it will leave the spec file behind. With this as a starting point, you can easily ramp up your skill at hand building spec files.

Lastly, whenever you install a package with CheckInstall, it will automatically make a backup tarball of the currently installed package, if one exists. You'll find a file named: "backup-<datetime>-pre-<packagename>-<version>.tgz" in the directory from which you built the package. Should anything go wrong with the newly created package, you can roll back to the previous version using a command like: "tar xzvf backup-<datetime>-pre-<packagename>-<version>.tgz -C /".

As for the future direction of CheckInstall development, Felipe said this:

If he is able to get this functionality into CheckInstall, it will become an even more required tool for systems administrators, along with yum and apt.

Bottom line: CheckInstall is a fantastic tool that should be on every administrators and developers need-to-have list.

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