In automated infrastructure, for me, installing from source is not an option. So I build deb packages and tell chef to install these. To avoid external dependencies packages are installed from local repo.

One day I will learn proper Debian packaging… but before it happens I’ll keep enjoying building packages using FPM.

This post is quick cheat sheet for using FPM to build .deb packages. First we need to install FPM.

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
sudo gem install fpm

Let’s build phantomjs deb package.

wget https://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
tar jxf phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
cd phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64/
mkdir usr
mv bin usr/
fpm -s dir -t deb -n phantomjs -v 1.9.2 -a x86_64 -C ~/phantomjs-1.9.2-linux-x86_64 -p phantomjs-VERSION_ARCH.deb usr/bin

Setting up collecting Apache metrics to ganglia using sFlow is pretty straightforward, except that installing from source, especially when automated, isn’t nice to maintain. FPM to the rescue. Let’s build mod_sflow .deb with apache module config file:

sudo apt-get install apache2-dev
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/apache2/modules
git clone https://github.com/kplimack/mod_sflow
cd mod_sflow/
sudo apxs2 -c -i mod_sflow.c sflow_api.c
mkdir -p /tmp/mod_sflow/usr/lib/apache2/modules/ /tmp/mod_sflow/etc/apache2/mods-available/
echo "LoadModule sflow_module       /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_sflow.so" > /tmp/mod_sflow/etc/apache2/mods-available/sflow.load
sudo mv /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_sflow.so /tmp/mod_sflow/usr/lib/apache2/modules/
fpm -s dir -t deb -n mod_sflow -v 1.0.4 -a x86_64 -C /tmp/mod_sflow/ -p libapache2-mod-sflow-VERSION_ARCH.deb .

verify the contents:

$ dpkg --contents libapache2-mod-sflow-1.0.4_amd64.deb
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./etc/
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./etc/apache2/
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./etc/apache2/mods-available/
 -rw-r--r-- 0/0              68 2014-02-24 20:52 ./etc/apache2/mods-available/sflow.load
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./usr/
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./usr/lib/
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./usr/lib/apache2/
 drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2014-02-24 20:54 ./usr/lib/apache2/modules/
 -rw-r--r-- 0/0          194981 2014-02-24 20:49 ./usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_sflow.so

Profit!