Installing RPMs as a regular user
A while back I needed some packages on a machine that I don't have admin rights to. Grabbing the source and recompiling would have been a pain the a** so I decided to read the rpm man pages and look for a way to install packages in the user home directory. Since it's such a nice package manager, it comes with options that allows me to do just that. The command needed is:
where OLDPATH is the path in the package; and NEWPATH is something like /home/user/userroot/usr, etc.
It's best to run
to see exactly which paths are going to be used by the package. For example, if the package foo.rpm produces:
then the steps needed are:
That'll install the package under the hierarchy ~/myroot. There will some errors from rpmdb but this is fine since the rpmdb is in a filesystem that we do not have write access to. The only repercussion is that rpm will have no record of the package foo being installed (so packages will have to be removed by hand); but that's okay since we cannot possibly mess up the system while installing stuff under our own home dirs.
The only steps remaining are to add the new paths to the binary and library search paths. To so this, add the following lines to ~/.bash_profile
This is only efficient as long as the package does not have too many unmet dependencies -- since you will need to grab and install all missing dependencies along with the package itself. And even if you had installed some of the dependencies earlier using this method, rpm will not know about it since there will be no entry in the system rpmdb.
$ rpm -ivh --relocate OLDPATH1=NEWPATH1 [--relocate OLDPATH2=NEWPATH2 ...] --badreloc package.rpm
where OLDPATH is the path in the package; and NEWPATH is something like /home/user/userroot/usr, etc.
It's best to run
$ rpm -qpl package.rpm
to see exactly which paths are going to be used by the package. For example, if the package foo.rpm produces:
$ rpm -qpl foo.rpm
/usr/bin/foo
/usr/lib/foo.so.0.0
/usr/lib/foo.so.0
/usr/share/doc/foo/README
then the steps needed are:
$ mkdir -p ~/myroot/usr/bin ~/myroot/usr/lib ~/myroot/usr/share/doc
$ rpm -ivh --relocate /usr=/home/$USER/myroot/usr --badreloc foo.rpm
That'll install the package under the hierarchy ~/myroot. There will some errors from rpmdb but this is fine since the rpmdb is in a filesystem that we do not have write access to. The only repercussion is that rpm will have no record of the package foo being installed (so packages will have to be removed by hand); but that's okay since we cannot possibly mess up the system while installing stuff under our own home dirs.
The only steps remaining are to add the new paths to the binary and library search paths. To so this, add the following lines to ~/.bash_profile
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/myroot/usr/bin
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/myroot/usr/lib
export PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH
This is only efficient as long as the package does not have too many unmet dependencies -- since you will need to grab and install all missing dependencies along with the package itself. And even if you had installed some of the dependencies earlier using this method, rpm will not know about it since there will be no entry in the system rpmdb.
posted by DarkKnight at 10:03
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