Greetings! It has been a while since I’ve posted anything in my systems administration blog. In this post I will describe my process for building a newer version of the Mongo C driver for Enterprise Linux/CentOS 7. These steps were also performed on an Enterprise Linux 6 system, but this post will focus on EL7 solely.
Last year I was asked by a developer to obtain a newer version of the Mongo C Driver for CentOS 7, as the one currently available in the EPEL repository, 1.3.6, does not support the most recent versions of MongoDB. I could not find a guide on the Internet for building an RPM of the newer version, so I was required to piece together a solution on my own. Originally I built the package on a build virtual machine; however, I later chose to use Docker, as the package requires several dependencies and I did not want to break anything on the build server. This example uses Docker, but it should work on a standard CentOS system as well.
To begin, I obtained a spec file for the latest mongo-c-driver, for Fedora. At the time I used the FC34 mongo-c-driver-1.17.1-1 SRPM from Remi’s RPM repository and modified it to make it to work on CentOS 6 and 7. All credit goes to Remi Collet; I merely adapted this spec file for my own needs. Expand the below to see the example spec file:
mongo-c-driver.spec
# remirepo spec file for mongo-c-driver
#
# Copyright (c) 2015-2020 Remi Collet
# License: CC-BY-SA
# http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#
%global gh_owner mongodb
%global gh_project mongo-c-driver
%global libname libmongoc
%global libver 1.0
%global up_version 1.17.4
#global up_prever rc0
# disabled as require a MongoDB server
%bcond_with tests
Name: mongo-c-driver
Summary: Client library written in C for MongoDB
Version: %{up_version}%{?up_prever:~%{up_prever}}
Release: 1%{?dist}
# See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES
License: ASL 2.0 and ISC and MIT and zlib
URL: https://github.com/%{gh_owner}/%{gh_project}
Source0: https://github.com/%{gh_owner}/%{gh_project}/releases/download/%{up_version}%{?up_prever:-%{up_prever}}/%{gh_project}-%{up_version}%{?up_prever:-%{up_prever}}.tar.gz
BuildRequires: cmake3
BuildRequires: gcc
# pkg-config may pull compat-openssl10
BuildRequires: openssl-devel
%if %{with tests}
BuildRequires: mongodb-server
BuildRequires: openssl
%endif
# From man pages
Requires: %{name}-libs%{?_isa} = %{version}-%{release}
Requires: libmongocrypt
# Sub package removed
Obsoletes: %{name}-tools < 1.3.0
Provides: %{name}-tools = %{version}
Provides: %{name}-tools%{?_isa} = %{version}
%description
%{name} is a client library written in C for MongoDB.
%package libs
Summary: Shared libraries for %{name}
%description libs
This package contains the shared libraries for %{name}.
%package devel
Summary: Header files and development libraries for %{name}
Requires: %{name}%{?_isa} = %{version}-%{release}
Requires: pkgconfig
Requires: pkgconfig(libzstd)
Requires: libmongocrypt
%description devel
This package contains the header files and development libraries
for %{name}.
Documentation: http://mongoc.org/libmongoc/%{version}/
%package -n libbson
Summary: Building, parsing, and iterating BSON documents
# Modified (with bson allocator and some warning fixes and huge indentation
# refactoring) jsonsl is bundled .
# jsonsl upstream likes copylib approach and does not plan a release
# .
Provides: bundled(jsonsl)
%description -n libbson
This is a library providing useful routines related to building, parsing,
and iterating BSON documents
I placed this spec file in a work directory, then downloaded the mongo-c-driver tarball from https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver/releases into the same work directory. I also created two Yum repo files for installing some of the dependencies for the build. These were libmongocrypt and MongoDB (I chose to install version 4.0):
[libmongocrypt] name=libmongocrypt repository baseurl=https://libmongocrypt.s3.amazonaws.com/yum/redhat/$releasever/libmongocrypt/1.0/x86_64 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 gpgkey=https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/libmongocrypt.asc
[mongodb-org-4.0] name=MongoDB Repository baseurl=https://repo.mongodb.org/yum/redhat/$releasever/mongodb-org/4.0/x86_64/ gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 gpgkey=https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.0.asc
Next, I created a Dockerfile in the work directory that installs the required dependencies and builds the image.
FROM centos:7
MAINTAINER Matt Ridpath matt@example.com
COPY libmongocrypt.repo /etc/yum.repos.d
COPY mongodb.repo /etc/yum.repos.d
RUN yum install -y epel-release
RUN yum install -y rpm-build icu libicu-devel python-sphinx python2-sphinx snappy cmake3 libzstd-devel libmongocrypt mongodb-org-server gcc openssl-devel cyrus-sasl-devel
WORKDIR /root
RUN mkdir -p rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
COPY mongo-c-driver-*.tar.gz rpmbuild/SOURCES
COPY mongo-c-driver.spec rpmbuild/SPECS
Now the container image can be built:
sudo docker build --pull -t="matt/mongo-c-driver" .
Next, I created a directory for the container to mount as a pass-through volume, so that it has a location to copy the finished RPMs into. I chose to create an “artifacts” directory within my work directory, as this task would later be turned into a Jenkins job. You can chose another location, however. The option follows the format of -v <local_dir>:<container_dir>. Once the directory had been created, I ran the container to build the RPMs:
sudo docker run --rm -v $HOME/mongo-c-driver/artifacts:/artifacts matt/mongo-c-driver /bin/bash -c "cd rpmbuild/SPECS && rpmbuild -ba mongo-c-driver.spec && cp ../RPMS/x86_64/*.rpm /artifacts"
If the RPM builds successfully, the RPMs should be dropped into the specified local directory in the -v option and made available for installation.
matt@docker:~$ ls mongo-c-driver/artifacts/ libbson-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm libbson-devel-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm mongo-c-driver-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm mongo-c-driver-debuginfo-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm mongo-c-driver-devel-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm mongo-c-driver-libs-1.17.4-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
In a future post, I will show how I turned this task into a Jenkins job, so that one can build these packages regularly as new versions are released.
Finally, a disclaimer: I’m not an expert on Docker or building RPMs. Someone else more than likely has a better solution for achieving this end result. Rather, I would merely like to share how I arrived at a solution for building these packages and hope it will save someone else the trial and error I went through.
Credits:
1) Remi Collet for providing the spec file to modify for this task: https://rpms.remirepo.net/.
2) mongo-c-driver contributors and authors for providing the source tarball: https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver.
3) This guide for providing an example of how to build RPMs with Docker: http://saule1508.github.io/build-rpm-with-docker/.