SRPMBuild

Building the Native SP from SRPM Source Packages

Building from SRPM is like a source build, but more automated and less prone to user error if you're inexperienced at building from source. It also results in a set of packages you can install or upgrade easily across many machines.

The basic process to rebuild an SRPM is simply this command:

The rpmbuild command, and others required for the build process, are often missing from a server installation, so you may need to install them first.  The following list of packages covers most of the prerequisites on many systems:

• automake

• boost-devel

• chrpath

• doxygen

• gcc-c++

• groff

• httpd-devel

• libidn-devel

• openldap-devel

• openssl-devel

• redhat-rpm-config

• rpm-build (for rpmbuild)

• stunnel (for curl-openssl)

• unixODBC-devel

You can save some time during the build process by installing all of the above that are available on your system, along with their dependencies.  On "yum" platforms, the simplest way is just to install them all at once:

yum will just ignore any packages which aren't available or are already installed and will install any dependencies of the packages requested automatically.  You'll discover any prerequisites not in the above list during the build process.  The one exception to this is the rpmbuild command itself.  If that isn't installed by this point, you can use the "yum provides rpmbuild" command to locate the package needed.

By default, rpmbuild requires root access in order to use the default RPM tree in /usr/src/redhat. This isn't recommended, but using a local RPM tree is beyond the scope of this document. Following the very small "Setup" section of How to patch and rebuild an RPM package will get you there in a few minutes, though.

To rebuild the whole set of packages required for the SP, you'll need to download the SRPMs from the download site and save them to /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/

You'll then need to repeat the same basic steps for each package, in the following order:

1. log4shib

2. xerces-c

3. xml-security-c

4. curl-openssl (on RHEL/CentOS 6.x and 7.x)

5. xmltooling

6. opensaml

7. shibboleth

If you jump ahead, the RPM commands will tell you what's missing. The basic steps for each package are:

Replace package, version, and arch above (usually i386, i686 or x86_64) with the necessary information in each case.  The last three packages have a "-schemas" RPM you need to install.

If at any time, you're told that a package needed to build the next one is missing, simply install it using yum or whatever tool is native to your OS. In particular, you'll usually need some kind of Apache development package (often httpd-devel) and its dependencies, assuming your goal is to integrate with the Apache that comes with your OS.

If on the other hand something breaks, it's possible that you've found a bug in one of the packages (usually not in the source, just the packaging process) and you can search the mailing list or ask for help.

At the end of the process, you'll be left with everything you need installed and you can refer to the RPM topic to proceed.

SRPM Options

A few options are built-in to control certain dependencies and turn on and off some optional features:

Targeting a Custom Apache

Should the need arise to customize the build process to target a non-standard Apache, various options can be passed to the rpmbuild command. In fact, you can completely control the configure command used by passing in the macro shib_options:

In this fashion, you can supply the usual configure options that control Apache build settings, such as --enable-apache-20 or --with-apxs2 and so on.

If you need to disable the RPM's dependency on the native OS Apache development package, you can use the option for that listed above in the table.

Examples

Amazon Linux 2018-03 with Apache 2.4

Amazon Linux 2018-03 with Apache 2.4 requires some additional arguments to be provided. This is because it uses the package http24_devel rather than http_devel and apxs is in a different location than expected.

Amazon Linux 2

A fairly standard SRPM build and install will be successful on an Amazon Linux 2 distribution without specifying a custom APXS.  You will need to install libmemcached-devel before you can build Shibboleth itself.