Fedora COPR & gowall

The best guide where i hold your hand from 0-100 to get your project on Fedora COPR. Work within docker and learn how gowall was put on Fedora COPR.

Before we start

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I) When i was trying to put my project on Fedora COPR, i struggled quite a bit because the documentation was, well... nonexistent .

II) What didn't help was that i had zero idea how to even make a Linux RPM package (probably like your dear reader).

III) Even worse i have never played around with Fedora before.

To address I) & II i will make sure to hold your hand throughout this article from 0 to 100 and explain things as best as i can. To address problem III) we will use docker to build the project since Fedora is not my daily driver and this allows everyone to participate with a clean environment no matter their distro from the same starting point.

Prerequisites : Docker

If you are on Fedora and you don't want to use Docker that's fine as well. Lastly this guide was created from my notes in Obsidian so there may be some inconsistencies.

TLDR

You grab your project from your tarballs (ex. github release section),write a .spec file, build the .rpm, test its working as expected with dnf and then you just push your project to the COPR repositories via the copr-cli.

Getting Started : Environment & .spec file

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1. Run Fedora in docker so we can build the .rpm there and test that its working.

Here i also install go since you know gowall is writen in go ... go-wall, yea anyway

docker run -it fedora:latest
sudo dnf update -y
sudo dnf install rpm-build rpmdevtools git dnf-plugins-core golang -y

2. Set up the RPM build directory

Some tools expect you to be running as not-root so we have to create a user. This builder user is a pleb for now. We will give him sudo permissions later.

useradd -m builder
su - builder

rpmdev-setuptree

The directory structure should look something like this :

rpmbuild/
├── BUILD
├── RPMS
├── SOURCES
├── SPECS
├── SRPMS

3. Put your tarball tar.gz (ex. from github releases) within the SOURCES folder

cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES

curl -L -o gowall-0.2.0.tar.gz 
https://github.com/Achno/gowall/archive/refs/tags/v0.2.0.tar.gz

4. Navigate to the SPECS directory,Create a spec file for your project, if you happen to be building a go project like me you can easily copy-paste the below .spec provided your project does not depend on other packages.

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
touch gowall.spec
vi gowall.spec

You could also try the rpmdev-newspec utility if you want for the .spec file. Check this resource if you want to understand what all these fields mean.

Name:           gowall
Version:        0.2.1
Release:        1%{?dist}
Summary:        An image processing toolbox CLI, Convert wallpapers color theme...

License:        MIT
URL:            https://github.com/Achno/gowall
Source0:        %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz

BuildRequires:  golang
BuildRequires: git
Requires:       glibc

%description
%{summary}

%prep
%setup -q

%build
export CGO_CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS}"
export CGO_CFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
export CGO_CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS}"
export CGO_LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS}"
export GOFLAGS="-buildmode=pie -trimpath -ldflags=-linkmode=external -mod=readonly -modcacherw"

go mod tidy
go build -v -o gowall

%install
install -Dm0755 %{name} %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/%{name}

%files
%{_bindir}/%{name}
%license LICENSE
%doc README.md

Build the RPM

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1. Build the package, you should see a .rpm and a SRPM src.rpm. For example

rpmbuild -ba gowall.spec

• RPM: ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/PackageName-0.1.9-1.fc38.x86_64.rpm
• SRPM: ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/PackageName-0.1.9-1.src.rpm

Test the RPM locally in the Docker container

Type exit to go back to the root user and make the builder have sudo permissions usermod -aG wheel builder and change his password passwd builder and lastly change back to the builder user su - builder. Now we can test our package

sudo dnf install ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/gowall-0.2.0-1.fc$(rpm -E %fedora).x86_64.rpm

Now lets test our application. You will see the gowall version if you run it and that confirms that its working just fine.

gowall -v 

Then just remove it with the following, after you are done testing it :

sudo dnf remove gowall

Upload your RPM to Fedora COPR

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Create a Fedora account

Visit here and sign up. Then visit the fedora COPR website and login,once logged in, scroll down to the page footer. You will see Site navigation and API on the center. You will then see a code block with some configuration copy that.

Next install copr-cli.

sudo dnf install copr-cli

• Create the below file and paste that configuration there. The config is just an auth token so we can push our project to the COPR servers.

vi ~/.config/copr

Create a New Project & Upload it

1. Create a new project

The --chroot is important and are the architectures you want to build for as well as the fedora versions. If Fedora upgrades you also need to update your COPR package as well.

Everything can be changed BUT the package name so be careful.

copr-cli create gowall --chroot fedora-41-x86_64 --description "A tool to convert a Wallpaper's color scheme & more image processing features"

2. Create the .src.rpm

rpmbuild -bs ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/gowall.spec

warning

You need to enable internet access during builds. Go to the fedora COPR website and then check that checkbox : Settings>Enable Internet Access during builds.

3. Upload the .src.rpm to COPR. Now we uploaded a build

copr-cli build gowall ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gowall-0.2.0-1.fc41.src.rpm

4. Go to the COPR dashboard and monitor the build status and enjoy the fruit of your labor.

How Users will download your package

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Installation is incredibly easy. Enable the repository and install the package.

sudo dnf copr enable <your_fedora_username>/<PackageName>
sudo dnf install <PackageName>

You can see your username in the ~/.config/copr file we created earlier.

Now in the COPR package section head over to setting and fill in the Instructions on how your project can be installed

Automate all of this with Github actions

Check here on how to automate all of this by triggering builds on push by tag events on a CI pipeline

How to get your package to the official Fedora repositories

It's a really back and forth time consuming process, this video is the best i have seen in explaining it.

I hope you liked my style of writing :) Check out gowall if like you like features like converting wallpapers or icons to your favourite color scheme, OCR powered via Local Vision LLM's Tesseract + LLM's along with other providers ( scheduled for the v0.2.2 release, well whenever i release that) and other image processing features.