FPM - Effing Package Management

I've seen a couple success stories now on the web using a pretty new tool on GitHub for building packages.  It's lovingly named FPM, which is short for "Effing Package Management".  Here's the background story from the GitHub page:

Sometimes packaging is done wrong (because you can't do it right for all situations), but small tweaks can fix it.

And sometimes, there isn't a package available for the tool you need.

And sometimes if you ask "How do I get python 3 on CentOS 5?" some unhelpful trolls will tell you to "Use another distro"

Further, a recent job switch has me now using Ubuntu for production while prior was CentOS. These use two totally different package systems with completely different packaging policies and support tools. It was painful and confusing learning both. I want to save myself (and you) that pain in the future.

It should be easy to say "here's my install dir and here's some dependencies; please make a package"  -- Jordan Sissel, author of FPM

Building new packages, no matter how good you get at it, can be a difficult and time consuming process.  It could be well worth your time to install FPM on your build system and try it out

Here are some of the packages (targets) you can build:

• deb
• rpm
• solaris

And the sources you can draw from:

• directory (of compiled source of some application)
• gem
• python eggs
• rpm
• node npm packages

Take a look at the tutorial I found on MDLog:/sysadmin for some simple examples on how to build packages with FPM from various input sources.