RPM vs jar

Java applications archives as jar, war and ear files are elementary distribution blocks in the java world. At the beginning managing all of these libraries and components were a bit cumbersome and error prone as the project dependencies depends on another libraries and all those transitive dependencies creates so called dependency hell. In order to ease developers of this burden Apache Maven (maven like tools) were developed. Every artefact has so called coordinates which uniquely identifies it and all dependencies are driven by those coordinates in a recursive fashion.

Maven ease the management at the stage of the artefact development but doesn’t help that much when we want to deploy the application component. Many times that’s not such a big deal if your run time environment is clustered J2EE aplication server e.g. Weblogic cluster. You hand the ear or war over to your ops team and they deploy it to the cluster via cluster management console to all nodes at once. They need to maintain an archive of deployed components in case of roll back etc. This is the simplest case (isolated component and doesn’t solve dependencies e.g. libraries provided in the cluster etc.) where management is relatively clean but relying on the process a lot. When we consider different run time environment like run the application as a server less java process (opposed to J2EE cluster) then the stuff gets a bit more complicated even for a simplest case. Your java applications are typically distributed as a jar file and you need to distribute it to every single linux server where instance of this process is running. Apart of that standard jar file doesn’t contain dependencies. One possible solution to that would be to create shaded (fat) jar file which has all dependencies embedded. I suppose that you have a repository where all builds are archived. Does it make sense to store those big archives where the major part are 3rd party libraries? This is probably not the right way to go.

Another aspect of roll out process is ability to automate it. In case of J2EE clusters like weblogic there is often scripting tool provided (WLST ~ weblogic scripting tool). The land of pure jar is again a lot worse. You can take some advantage of maven but that doesn’t solve all the problems. Majority of production environments in java world run on linux operating system so why not to try to take advantage of linux server standard distribution management like yum, apt etc. for distributing rpm linux packages. This system provides atomicity, dependency management between rpm linux packages, easy way to roll back (keeps track of versions), minimise the number of manual steps – potential of human error is reduced and involves native auditing. It is pretty easy to get an info about installation history.

Pack java application to RPM

rpmbuild tool introduction

To pack your java jar file application you need a tool called rpmbuild which creates a linux package from a SPEC file. SPEC file is something like pom in maven world plus it contains instruction how to install, uninstall etc. Packages containing a required plus handy tools are rpmdevtool and rpmlint. On linux OS it is simple to install it. On Windows OS you need a cygwin installed with the same tool set. In order to build your rpm work space run the following command. It is highly recommended not to run it under root account if there is no special need for it.

rpmdev-setuptree

This command creates rpmbuild folder – that is the place where all linux RPM packaging will happen. It contains sub-folders: BUILD, RPMS, SOURCES, SPECS, SRPMS. For us the important ones are RPMS – will contain final linux rpm and SPECS – this is the place we need to put our SPEC file describing installation and content of our application.
Create spec file
This file is the core of the linux rpm packaging. It contains all the information about version, dependencies, installation, un-installation, upgrade etc. We can create our skeleton SPEC file by running following command:
rpmdev-newspec

Majority of directives in this file are clear from its name, e.g. Name, Version, Summary, BuildArch etc. BuildRoot require special attention. It is a sort of proxy which mimics a root of system under the construction e.g. If I want to install my [application_name] (replace this place holder with actual name) to /usr/local/[application_name] location I have to create this structure under BuildRoot during the installation. Then there are important sections which corresponds to various phases of installation: %prep, %build, %install – which is the most important for as as we do not build from sources but just pack already built jar file to linux rpm package. Last very important section of this file is %files which lists all files which will be in the final linux rpm package and hence installed in the target machine. Apart from that there can be additional hooks to installation and un-installation process as %post, %preun, %postun etc. which allows you to customize a process as you need. Sample SPEC file follows:
%define _tmppath /home/virtual/rpmbuild/tmp
Name: [application_name]
Version: 1.0.2
Release: 1%{?dist}
Summary: Processor component which feed data into DB
Group: Applications/System
License: GPL
URL: https://jaksky.wordpress.com/
BuildRoot: %{_topdir}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root
BuildArch: noarch
Requires: jdk >= 7
%description
Component which process incoming messages and store them to DB.

%prep

%build

%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/local
cp -r %{_tmppath}/[application_name] $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/local
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/local/[application_name]/logs
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/init.d
cp -r %{_tmppath}/[application_name]/bin/[application_name] $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/init.d
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/var/run/[java application]

%files
%defattr(644,[application_name],[application_name])
%dir %attr(755, [application_name],[application_name])/usr/local/[application_name]
%dir %attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/lib
/usr/local/[application_name]/lib/*
%attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/logs
%dir %attr(755,[[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/conf
%config /usr/local/[application_name]/conf/[application_name]-config.xml
%config /usr/local/[application_name]/conf/log4j.properties
%dir %attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/deploy
/usr/local/[application_name]/deploy/*
%doc /usr/local/[application_name]/README.txt
%dir %attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/bin
%attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /usr/local/[application_name]/bin/*
%attr(755,root,root) /etc/init.d/[application_name]
%dir %attr(755,[application_name],[application_name]) /var/run/[application_name]

%changelog
* Wed Nov 13 2013 Jakub Stransky <Jakub.Stransky@jaksky.com> 1.0.2-1
- Bug Fixing wrong messages format
* Wed Nov 13 2013 Jakub Stransky <Jakub.Stransky@jaksky.com> 1.0.1-1
- Bug Fixing wrong messages format
* Mon Nov 11 2013 Jakub Stransky <Jakub.Stransky@jaksky.com> 1.0.0-1
- First relaese of [application_name]

Several things to highlight in the SPEC file example: tmppath points to the location where the installed application is prepared, that is essentially what is going to be packed to rpm package. %defattr set the standard attributes to files if special one are not specified. %config denotes configuration files which means that for the first installation those standard one are provided but in case of upgrade those file will not be overwritten as they are probably customized to this particular instance.
Create PRM package
Now we are ready to create the linux rpm package just the last step is pending:
rpmbuild -v -bb --clean SPECS/nameOfTheSpecFile.spec

TEst RPM package
Created package can be found in RPMS subfolder. We can test the package locally by
rpm -i nameOfTheRpmPackage.rpm

To complete the smoke test lets remove the package by
rpm -e nameOfTheApplication

Creating a SPEC file should be pretty straightforward process and once you create your SPEC file for the application building of linux rpm package is one minute job. But if you want to automate it there is a maven plugin which generates a SPEC file for you. It is essentially wrapper of rpmbuild utility which means that plugin works fine on linux with tool set installed but on windows machine you need have cygwin installed and create wrapper bat file to mimic rpmbuild utility for the plugin. Detailed manual can be found for example here.
Couple things to highlight when creating a SPEC file. Prepare the linux package for all scenarios – install, remove, upgrade and configuration management right from the beginning. Test it properly. It can save you a lot of troubles and manual work in case of large installations. Creating a new version of java application is only about about replacing jar file, re-packaging rpm bundle.
Conclusion
In this quick walk through I tried to show that creating of linux rpm package as a unit for software deployment of the java application is not that difficult and can neaten a roll out process. I just scratch the surface of linux rpm packaging and I was far away from showing all capabilities of this approach. I will conclude this post by several links which I found really useful.
If you have some tips or wan’t share your experience please find the comment section bellow or reach me on twitter
References
Great tutorial on RPM packaging in general

Good rpmbuld manual pages

Maven rpm plugin

Maximum RPM book
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