Where is the RPM spec file hosted?

Consul
1

Hello,

I’m excited to see that Hashicorp is providing RPMS for it’s packages. I’d like to review what the spec file to make sure we can use it. Where can I find it? A Github link would be ideal.

Thanks,
Wes

2

Hi Wes,

The packaging scripts and artifacts aren’t currently in an open source repo (we’re working on that), however I’m happy to answer any questions you have about the RPMs! For starters, they’re created using fpm to package up the same binaries hosted on releases.hashicorp.com with a systemd unit file, default configuration file, and install scriptlets.

Thanks,
Kyle

3

Kyle,

Thank you for your response. I look forward to seeing the upstream rpm creation artifacts. We have internally managed RPMs for many tools (Consul being one), but if we can move upstream to the origin that is generally better. Normally I give the spec file a read through for tools like this vs. installing them to see how they work since the devil is in the details. Consul is mission critical for our services so without the details it’s harder for my team to adopt them for the following reasons:

  1. We can’t see everything that happens during install time to ensure compliance. (scripts run, SELinux configuration, etc)
  2. We can’t recreate the same thing with another version if needed. (Say you change how you want to configure systemd or something like that & we need to fork for a while because of local conditions.)

You are already likely aware of https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/golang/tree/master or the centos site https://git.centos.org/rpms/cloud-init/tree/c8 . They are my go-to references usually.

What is your SLA for released versions? Will you keep every release version/only the last few? I was surprised that the yum repo URL wasn’t browse-able as that helps answer some of these questions. Also what is the timeline for open sourcing the spec files (or whatever the right fpm input vector is)?

Despite all my questions & issues I shared above, I’m excited that Hashicorp is moving in this direction. It is a huge win to be able to run yum install consul and get something that with a small bit of configuration you can be confident in.

Best,
Wes

4

Thanks for your excitement :slight_smile:

1 - I understand the importance of this, and while you could inspect a specific RPM for these things, there’s currently no way from an external perspective to be sure that the next package will have the same attributes. This should be satisfied when the resources are open sourced.

2 - Should also be satisfied when things are open sourced!

Our plan for these packages is to retain all versions, so if a package is available in the repo today it will always be available. New versions for packages are also available as soon as product updates are released! Making the repo browsable is high on our priority list, which should also make the repo much more self-explanatory.

Timeline-wise (for open-sourcing resources and browsable repo), I don’t have a specific answer for you, but I can say it’s on the scale of weeks and not months/years/tbd.

Hope that helps! Happy to answer any further questions, and I’ll post back as the above items are available.

Thanks,
Kyle

2 Likes
5

Sorry if this has already been answered elsewhere, but it would be extremely useful if there was a way to access the SPEC files. Are these available yet? Looking to use Consul, Vault and Nomad in a minimal distro (without a package manager), bundled by default but this requires a SPEC file.

Thank you in advance
Rob

6

Hi Rob,

The packaging related resources aren’t available quite yet, but we’re currently working on it! These will be available in the respective product github repositories for Consul, Vault, and Nomad in the coming months. These aren’t rpm SPEC files however, so if you’re specifically needing SPEC files, we don’t maintain any.

Hopefully that helps!

Thanks,
Kyle