Creating RPMs from python packages

While I can use pip to install additional python packages on my development box, sometimes I need to deploy an application into an environment where this isn’t possible.  The best solution if the target box is an RPM-based linux distro is to install any necessary python dependencies as RPMs.  However, not all python packages are available as rpms.

To build them yourself, you’ll need a package called py2pack.  Install it thusly:

pip install py2pack

Let’s say you need to RPM-ify the fastkml package.  On CentOS/Fedora/RHEL, do the following:

mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS} # If you don't already have this

cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
py2pack fetch fastkml 0.9  # Version number is optional

This will download the fastkml tarball into ~rpmbuild/SOURCES.  Next, you’ll need to create the RPM spec file.  Py2pack has a few templates, we’ll use the ‘Fedora’ one:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
py2pack generate fastkml 0.9 -t fedora.spec -f python-fastkml.spec

This will generate a spec file, which you may then feed into rpmbuild:

rpmbuild -bb python-fastkml.spec #Use -bs to build a source rpm

This hopefully should work, and will dump an rpm file into the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS directory.  Note: This isn’t perfect, I’ve already encountered a few python packages for which this procedure doesn’t work cleanly.